Europe's ewe-lamb, and other essays on the great war

Ill) ROPE'S
EWE- LA MB

VINCENT McNABB

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in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/europesewelambotOOmcnauoft

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

imprimatur.

F. HUMBERTUS EVEREST, O.P., S.T.B.,

Prior Provincialis.

Londiki,
die 14 Septembrift, 1915.

EDM. CAN. SURMONT,

Vicarius Gene.ralis.

Westmonasterii,
die 27 Septembri*, 1915.

^tthil (Dbstat.

H. S. BOWDEN,

Censor Deputatiis.

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

AND OTHER ESSAYS
ON THE GREAT WAR

BY

VINCENT McNABB, O.P., S.T.B.

AUTHOR OF
" OUR REASONABLE SERVICE," ETC.

R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD.

PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
AND AT MANCHESTER, BIRMINGHAM, AND GLASGOW
jQl6 All rights reserved

TO

BELGIUM

CRUSHED BUT UNCONQUERED

THE WORLD'S LEADER IN WAYS OF PEACE

THE WORLD'S HERO IN DAYS OF WAR.

LAID IN A MANGER

(CHRISTMAS, 1914)

Of His glory He is shorn ;

He is stalled with ass and ox.
But the stars know God is born

Nigh where shepherds fold their flocks.

Belgium ! thou too art of men

Outcast, and dost herd with beast.

Fear not ; thou art born again,
Freedom's blood-anointed priest.

Know that until time is run,

When men speak of Liberty
And of God, Whose will was done,

Belgium ! they shall speak of thee.

PREFACE

To a priest and a friar-preacher, who had
been a student of Louvain for three years,
the Great War with its invasion of Belgium
was an irresistible challenge. From the
first moment that German soldiers were
on Belgian soil the present writer, not being
allowed to carry a rifle, put his tongue and
pen at the service of the little outraged
country.

Some of the fruits of his pen are here
gathered together, in the hope that as they
once served Belgium by what they said
and by what they earned, they may again
help the little nation that has so nobly
helped us.

In the war-anger of some passages in this

viii PREFACE

book the writer has taken as his model the
prophets of Judah and Israel ; who, with
still more slender justification, use language
that is still more forcible. These seers had
a clear insight into the duty of applying the
Decalogue to men, not only taken as indi-
viduals, but grouped into commonwealths.
They had all Plato's conviction — that the
four cardinal virtues are the only steadfast
foundation for the soul of a' man and for
the soul of a State. They had more than
Plato's vehemence in denouncing all false-
hood masquerading as truth, all theft
disguised as political necessity, all murder
proclaiming itself progress, all evil calling
itself good.

The present writer, far from belonging to
the race of jingo fire- worshippers, was pro-
fessedly a pacifist. In other words, he
looked on peace as an end ; and war as,
only at times, a loathesome necessity. His
master, St. Thomas Aquinas, had given
him that accurate, non-manichean Chris-

PREFACE ix

tian, crusader view of war whereby he
could say " God-speed ' to the men who
were on their way to the battle-fields of
Flanders.

But just as most of his recent writings
had been a defence of the poor work- folk
of whose life Pope Leo XIII. said that
it "was a yoke little better than that of
slavery itself," so was this pen-warfare on
behalf of Belgium a defence of a little
hard-working people against the theft and
murder of a vast super-nation. He did not
write to defend the Allies ; if for no other
reason than that the Allies seem capable of
defending themselves. But he mobilized
his pen and tongue on behalf of the little
treaty-sheltered nation, which had threatened
its neighbours only by its supreme achieve-
ments in the arts of peace.

This call to say something and to say it
strongly became the more imperative when
he found men urging that the Churches had
failed of their duty of leadership. On many

x PREFACE

public occasions, by written and spoken
word, he had said that a priest's duty was
not to give a lead in politics, no matter
how qualified he was for leadership. Like
every other citizen, a priest has a right
to a political opinion ; but this political
opinion is his right as a citizen and not
as a priest. On the other hand, the priest
speaks as a priest, and not as a citizen,
when he gives an ethical opinion. To sepa-
rate the ethical aspect from the political in
matters of policy is a task that may well
daunt the most accurate and daring minds.
In the complicated matter of the world's
greatest war, whilst much was debatable,
it seemed to the present writer that one
matter stood out with something like the
clearness of a dictate of conscience. That
one thing was Belgium.

His thoughts took this shape :

The invasion of Belgian neutrality is a
Fact ; admitted by Germany, Austria,
England, France, Russia, Belgium.

PREFACE xi

This breaking of Belgian neutrality is
either wrong or right.

By itself it is wrong ; circumstances alone
could make it right.

Therefore, Belgium has not the duty of
provirig that the Invasion was wrong. But
Germany has the duty of proving that the
Invasion was right. The burden of proof is
upon the State which undeniably broke this
neutrality.

Now, it will be readily admitted that
nations are sometimes in such extremity
of danger that they cannot waste time in
showing the justice of their seemingly
unjust act. For this reason it may be
granted that, if Germany had just reasons
for breaking Belgian neutrality, it might
have to strike first and show its evidence
afterwards.

Let so much be granted. This is only to
grant a delay, and not a dispensation, in the
matter of evidence.

A year has passed and only two state-

xii PREFACE

ments that in any way approach the nature
of evidence have been made. Germany says :

(a) Belgian neutrality had already been
broken by the presence of French and even
of British soldiers in Belgium.

In reply, it has to be said that this is a
mere assertion. There is not a scrap of
evidence. Clearly the Berlin Government
that made the statement could not have had
first-hand evidence. If there is other evi-
dence such as would be admitted in a
criminal case, say, against a German
General by a German Law Court, it is
strange that a year has passed without
such evidence being made public.

But, indeed, the Berlin Government, hav-
ing realized that this assertion had not
even the stature or gait of evidence, have
given up using it. They now changed
their ground to

(b) Belgium had already broken its neu-
trality by entering into a military alliance
with England.

PREFACE xiii

It is claimed that to prove this plea evi-
dence is forthcoming. When the German
army occupied Brussels they found in the
archives a " Convention " between England
and Belgium with regard to military affairs.

But this so-called "Convention" was
nothing but the account of a military
discussion between the English military
attache, Barnardiston, and the Belgian
General Jungbluth.

King Albert explained the nature of
this discussion in an interview with Mr.
Henry Hall, of the New York World, on
March 22. He said that the discussion
which had taken place was such as might
normally take place between the military
authorities of two nations, one of which
was treaty-bound to protect the neutrality
of the other.

But King Albert added : " So great was
my wish to avoid even the semblance of
anything that could be looked upon as
against my neutrality that I communicated

xiv PREFACE

to the German military attache at Brussels
the facts about which they are trying to
make such stir.

" When the Germans examined our ar-
chives they knew exactly what they were
going to find ; and all their surprise and
indignation are feigned."

This of itself would be enough to dis-
credit the so-called evidence on which a
little nation's neutrality was violated with
theft and murder.

But the plea is damning. If so much is
made of this evidence, it is a sign that no
other evidence is forthcoming. And, in-
deed, no other evidence is forthcoming.

Now, how can Germany plead that she
broke the neutrality of Belgium in the
opening days of August on evidence which
did not fall into her hands till many weeks
later ?

If a criminal charged with murder in a
German law court pleaded that, three weeks
after the murder, he discovered that his vie-

PREFACE xv

tim intended to murder him, what view
would be taken of the plea ?

It seems, and still seems to the present
writer, that the breaking of Belgian neu-
trality is a matter of evidence ; that after
twelve months the only evidence brought
forward by Germany is denied by King
Albert (whose word is still of worth), and
is self- condemnatory.

Again, it is a matter of justice that the
more serious the punishment the more cer-
tain should be the evidence. It is, of course,
agreed that the certainty needed in the
evidence of witnesses is not the self-evi-
dence of mathematical facts, but the moral
evidence of human beings. This kind of
evidence admits of degrees.

It is therefore agreed that only the
highest degree of evidence is needed to
bring in a verdict of capital punishment.
The lower degrees of evidence, if admitted
at all, are admitted only for lower degrees
of punishment, such as imprisonment for a

xvi PREFACE

short time. But when a jury is asked to
weigh the evidence for and against a pri-
soner charged with a capital crime, they
are told that if they have any doubt the
prisoner must be given the benefit of the
doubt. The jury must not bring in a
verdict of "Guilty" on a capital charge
unless they are quite certain, without a
doubt, that he committed the crime.

Germany was prepared to carry fire and
sword into Belgium, and it has fulfilled all
its preparations. In point of fact thousands
of Belgian citizens, as well as Belgian sol-
diers, have met a violent death. But a
great nation has the right to inflict such
deliberate and extreme penalty on a little
nation on one condition alone — namely,
that it has not any degree of evidence but
the highest degree of evidence.

It has, therefore, seemed to the present
writer that, if ever a priest might be ex-
pected to give an ethical opinion on a
public matter affecting the life and property

PREFACE xvii

of thousands of unoffending people, it* is
surely in the case of Belgium's broken
neutrality. Then, since Belgium's plight
was extreme, it seemed a further duty to
interfere as energetically as one could, after
the manner of the Hebrew prophets. Such
has been the motive of this book.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Laid tn a Manger - - vi

Preface - - vii

Europe's Ewe-Lamb - - 1

Terra Desert a et Desolata - 13

An Open Letter to Kaiser William - 23

Pity, Pacificism, and the Kaiser - - 35

An Open Letter to the German People - 45
A Christmas Letter to the Children of

Germany - - - - - 57

Help Belgium - - - -67

Britain's Duty to Belgium - - - 75

A Belgian Mother's Rosary - 85

On Hate - - - - - 99

Herr Professor - - - - 109

An Ambassador in a Chain - - - 119

A Dilemma ----- 129

Kaiserism and a Cardinal - - - 137

The Insult to the Belgian Clergy - 149

Another Word for Belgium - - 159

xx CONTENTS

PAGE

On False Pacifism - - - 169

The Ethics of War - - - 179

St. Thomas on Peace and Wah - - 189

The Appeal to Prayer - - - 201

The Problem of Suffering - - 213

Through War towards Hope - 229

War Wisdom of the Thirteenth Century - 247

A Way of Peace - 257
The Holy Father and the Invasion of

Belgium ----- 269

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

It is night ; quiet night within the silent
shadows of these Midland hills.

Were it a night as those that have gone
before, the quiet shadows would be a gentle
summons to sleep. But to-night I cannot
sleep.

For to-day I have heard and seen the
horrors I have dreaded since a child. The
Day ! I have heard the sobs of refugees
from Belgium. I have seen eyes filled with
tears, eyes but lately filled with the sight of
horrors beyond weeping.

On the table before me I have a crumpled
copy of Le Patriots Mardi, August 4,
printed in Brussels. In the corner of the
dishevelled " Special Edition " I am glad I
have made two refugees sign their names,

3

4 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

which they have done courteously, with a
wealth of protest.

Let me say out loud with pride that I
have kissed that war-grimed copy of Le
Patriote as a noble human thing, to be
honoured with a place apart amidst the
aristocracy of the monastic library. I never
saw a paper with so many typographical
errors. Some of the words are so mis-
shapen as to resemble Esperanto rather than
the language of Bossuet. But that, too,
has spoken to my heart and filled my eyes
with kindred weeping, for the very columns
of the daily paper seemed to weep.

Yet this weeping of the men of Belgium,
as we now know, is not a weakness. It is
part of that "Gift of Tears" which the
Mass Books still honour with a special
Mass. It is the outward sign visible of an
inward heroism which itself is a first victory
over well-founded fears.

In days to come the brave Belgians
will tell their children and their children's

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB 5

children how the King and Parliament and
People of Belgium behaved on August 3,
1914, when a fierce wild beast threatened
them with death if they would not do his
bidding. The little ewe-lamb of Europe
did not quail. It dreaded dishonour more
than death. It held that a nation's first
duty is not to keep its life, but to keep its
word. Is not all that written in the
crumpled pages of the Patriote that lie
before me as I write and weep ?

Its young King held out to his people
only the Golgotha of honour, sure of his
people's trust. He spoke no boastful word ;
he ended as a King should, by commending
his brave people to the King of Kings,
" God will be with us in our righteous
cause. Long live Belgium the free !"

His Prime Minister — now also Minister
of War — M. de Broqueville, was of his
King's noble self-restraint. There was infi-
nite tragedy in his closing words : " Speech
is now with the guns. We shall do our

6 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

duty — our whole duty. We may be over-
come, but we shall never be crushed. The
Belgian people will not fail in its duty. Of
that I am sure."

Then Belgium went out into the desert to
be tried of Satan. Be still, my soul, for angels
have gone with it, lest Satan should prevail.

To-night I am glad that I spent three
most precious years of my life in Belgium,
and that I loved its people as my brothers.
1 did not go there to learn the arts of war —
though now 1 know that Belgium can teach
the world the way of keeping honour by the
sword— but I went to study in its uni-
versities, where I found a republic of letters
giving freely of its best, as it had given for
hundreds of years to men whom religious
hate had driven from their fatherland.

And now I ask myself in an agony of
confusion, What crime has Belgium wrought
that she should be struck with the mailed
hand of the man of blood and iron ?

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB 7

There are nations that take to brigandage
amongst their fellow nations until such time
as the cowed nations can unite to over-
whelm the brigand. There are hawks
among the nations whose peace is but a
preparation for war, or the torpor after an
orgy of blood. But whom has Belgium
struck ? What blood has she shed, save in
defence of her home, her throne, her altar ?
So little has she been in the battles of
Europe, that the fire-eaters of Europe
called her armies " soldiers of tin." Liege
has shown that Belgian soldiers are of
steel.

Other nations commit the social crime of
making slaves of their own people. To
rescue such nations from their thraldom is
the duty of the freemen of a happier nation.
But who has ever found a slave in Belgium ?
Her children to-day have but one passionate
desire — to guard their beloved country with
their lives. Slaves do not offer their lives
that they may keep their chains. What

8 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

country has seen, as Belgium has just seen,
31,000 of its slaves offer themselves in one
day as volunteers for its defence ?

Some nations are warred against because
in their wilful ignorance they spoil the land
of their birth, leave its fertile lands untilled,
and keep more skilled and thriftier nations
from developing its wealth. But if the
more skilled and thriftier nations have a
right to invade the less skilled and thrifty,
then Belgian soldiers should be overrunning
Germany, for the smaller nation is the
greater in thrift and skill.

Indeed, we have the authority of one of
the world's greatest authorities that in every
matter of civilization Belgium is not in the
rear of civilization, but at its head. Hear a
plain statement of this master of statistics :
" The plains and meadows of Belgium are
indeed productive, but they owe it to the
labours of man. There is scarcely any soil
in Europe so unfertile by nature. If aban-
doned for only one or two years it returns

EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB 9

to barren waste. Constant care is required
if crops are to be obtained. The culture
here is, with the exception of the market
gardens round Paris, the most intensive in
Europe."*

Some of the facts this acknowledged
authority sets down are persuasive even in
a summary :

1. Belgium is the most densely populated
country in the world. Though it is only
about twice the area of Yorkshire, its popu-
lation is 7,500,000, and it has little or no
emigration.

2. It is an "industrial centre of extra-
ordinary activity."

3. Nevertheless, as an agricultural country
its yield per acre is the highest in Europe —
that is, in the world.

4. The agricultural population per square
mile is thrice that of England.

* "Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium."
By B. Seebohm Rowntree. London : Macmillan
and Co., 1910. Pp. 5, 6.

10 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

5. The average farm is 14| acres ; England,
63 acres.

6. Sixty-five per cent, of those on the
land are farmers, 35 per cent, labourers. In
England, 30 per cent, of those on the land
are farmers ; 70 per cent, labourers.

7. Yet rent is twice as high as in England.

8. It has the most extensive system of
main and light railways and canals in the
world. England is second — a long way
behind Belgium.

All these facts, drawn from the statistics
of an unprejudiced student of sociology,
make the German invasion of Belgium an
unpardonable crime against civilization. This
little country, like Greece in bygone days,
has put the greater nations to shame by its
superiority in all the arts of peace. Its
industry, its tillage, its art, have set it at the
head of the modern world. Its religious
tolerance, its enthusiasm for higher educa-
tion, its social legislation, are of such worth
as to make all its rivals its tributaries.

EUROPE^ EWE-LAMB 11

Yet it is not merely the present state of
Belgium, but its past history, that stirs up
the gratitude of a Catholic of these islands.
We are not so modern that we forget what
our fathers bore in the dark days of perse-
cution. In those days of our bitter pain
Belgium was the most helpful of friends.
There is hardly a town in that little country
without memories of the exiles whom re-
ligious misunderstanding drove from these
islands of saints. No history of the English
or Irish martyrs can be written without
copious mention of Antwerp, Bruges, Li&ge,
Brussels, Louvain, Ghent. Some of the
streets still bear the names of our own
beloved fatherland, as we know who have
trodden them.

We do not forget these things. We
pray God never to forget them, lest God
forget us. Most of all do we remember
them now that history has turned full wheel,
and we are seeing refugees of the country
that once gave us refuge.

12 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

The armies of Belgium are fighting in our
defence. Let us see that the losses of
Belgium are our losses, its sufferings are our
sufferings, and its wounded are our wounded,
on whom will be poured out with full hands
an alms of gratitude for countless good
deeds done to us in our dark night of the
soul.

TERRA DESERTA ET DESOLATA

TERRA DESERT A ET DESOLATA*

" Our gratitude to Belgium has now ceased to be
a sentiment and should become a sacrifice. We
cannot be content to say our thanks, but to express
them in the works of an unfeigned and golden
charity/"'

Belgium has suddenly become not only a
battlefield but a symbol. Countless ideas,
both conscious and subconscious, are focussed
in the name of the little country. Its un-
challenged density of population has yielded
to a greater density of social, political,
ethical, and spiritual ideals. To live in such
a moment is worth all the pangs of living.

Sons of Guzman and brothers of Aquinas
might be expected to feel the war in their
soul. Our thoughts are an invasion.

* Hawkesyard Review, vol. vii., No. 19.
15

16 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB];

Hordes of unsolved problems threaten to
outflank and envelop us. The age-honoured
monuments of our thinking are targets for
unseen artillery.

Some of us keep ourselves within sight of
sanity by two devices. First, in the chaos
of armed millions we keep clear lines of
communication with some simple base of
law. The present writer owns that the
Decalogue is his chief consolation. He has
a secret well of hope and joy in the noble
command, "Thou shalt not steal." Secondly,
in sheer self-defence he often repeats the
magic word " Belgium," lest under a great
dread or a deep hate he might lose his
reasons, and perhaps his reason.

A religious, and especially a religious
priest twice-vowed to a profession of self-
sacrifice, has no intellectual or moral kinship
with militarism. The pomp and circum-
stance of war are to him but a fierce con-
tradiction to the Cross.

To a Dominican it is significant that his

TERRA DESERTA ET DESOLATA 17

master, St. Thomas, in justifying war, seems
to speak only of wars of defence. Wars of
attack, aggression, propaganda, expansion,
are hard or even impossible to justify. A
Christian man who undertakes the dread
business of war must have something to
defend, and something that will outweigh
the pain, and hurt, and ruin, that are war's
necessary shadow. National independence
is such a precious thing. To defend its
national freedom a people may call up the
last man of fighting years and the last coin
in the treasury.

Herein lies the comfort of the word
" Belgium." We peace-vowed friars, to
whom a war of aggression is but theft and
murder on an imperial scale, can think of
Belgium in order to God-speed the fighting
men on their way to the Valley of Death.

For it is agreed that " Belgium " means a
free and independent Great Britain and
Ireland. Belgium is but the present field
of operations. Only thus is it a Belgian

2

18 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

war. But Great Britain and Ireland are
the end of the operations. Thus is it a
British war.

But Belgium is Belgium, that is, justice
is justice. The men who obey, or command,
the Kaiser, having laid homicidal hands on
their ward, the little land between the Meuse
and the Scheldt, what else could England
do but what England has done ? What
other course lies before a defender but to
defend ? Now, if justice is not to be de-
fended, I ask what is to be defended ?

Moreover, we, the stronger Power, could
not take up a neutral policy without sharing
in a great sin by not seeking to prevent a
great sin. Our neutrality would be a very
effective, if negative, co-operation. If silence,
that is, failure to speak, is sometimes con-
sent, how much more consent is there in
failure to act f For what purpose is power
committed to men if not to prevent the
stronger from unjustly crushing out the
weak? And if the powerful -shirk from

TERRA DESERTA ET DESOLATA 19

the pain and loss of checking the oppressor,
what is there in such weakness but the dis-
honour of a duty shirked ?

A further reason for an English Dominican
taking a supreme interest in the deliverance
of Belgium is the past history of English
Catholics. For wellnigh two centuries exiles
driven from our shores by religious perse-
cution found a home in Belgium. Few
Belgian towns have lacked their tragic group
of refugees. Antwerp, Louvain, Bruges,
Brussels, Ypres, Malines, are part of our
English Catholic history. They are as
sacred to us as London, Lancaster, or York.
Two centuries of hospitality have laid upon
us a duty of gratitude which the present war
has merely deepened. Our best efforts to
lighten Belgium's woes would be but partial
fulfilment of a duty that two centuries alone
could fulfil.

A last domestic motive urges us to stanch
Belgium's wounds, namely, our past history
as English Dominicans. We can never

20 EUROPE^ EWE-LAMB

forget Cardinal Howard, whom we call the
founder of our present English province.
But, in remembering him, we should never
forget that he deliberately chose to begin
the English Dominican Province, not in
Spain or France, but in Belgium. In
choosing this little country, he was moved
not so much by the fact that Belgium was
a few hours' sail from England, but that
Belgian ways of life and thought were like
our own. In place and manners the
Belgians were our nearest neighbours.

During the century and a half of our
sojourn in Belgium we received a trust that
never waned. Bornhem was a part of the
educational life of Belgium as well as
England. Louvain trained the men who
trained our English students in St. Thomas's
College.

Louvain has continued its kindness to this
day. Almost the entire band of Lectors in
our Province owe what is best in their
thought to their Alma Mater, Louvain.

TERRA DESERTA ET DESOLATA 21

There they found a soberness of view, a
thoroughness of research, an accuracy of ex-
pression, a loyalty of love, that could be
found perhaps nowhere else in such ample
measure. The remembrance of it is now
almost more a sorrow than a joy in these
days of chaos returned ; but it is a sorrow
that should beget a full measure of gratitude
to our beloved Belgium.

AN OPEN LETTER TO KAISER
WILLIAM

AN OPEN LETTER TO KAISER
WILLIAM

Once in a prison cell I heard a man, officially
labelled defective, say in deep compassion,
" The magistrates that condemned me — I
pity them."

With not one-hundredth part of this
kingly mercifulness I say, Kaiser William, I
pity you. Your unforgivable crime, crying
to Europe for vengeance, is that you are a
Kaiser and a German. In other words, you
are powerful and you are consistent.

You have brought Europe about your
ears by bringing to their conclusions what
thousands of the cultured men of Europe,
with twice your intelligence and none of
your power, are saying and writing every
day. In these back-water days who is not

25

26 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

obsessed by the idea of supermen? The
little knot of men in England who tried to
oppose this devilry two years ago were hooted
down at public meetings, because, forsooth,
they would not give to the Home Secretary,
in the sacrosanct name of Eugenics, the
Star Chamber power of imprisoning a man
for life.

Supermen are trying their best to put an
end to undermen. The weak must serve
the strong, or be put to death by the strong.
Some of the " more progressive spirits " are
boldly suggesting sterilization and euthanasia
— in plain words, mutilation and murder.
The mildest remedy in their pharmacopoeia
is a farm colony — that is, as they mean it,
slavery by force of law — that is, by the law
of force.

This, you will see, Kaiser William, is logic
and consistency. So, too, was the guillotine.
Its stroke was a very perfect conclusion.
Its result was a very satisfactory chop-logic,
working with the precision of a machine-gun.

OPEN LETTER TO KAISER WILLIAM 27

Now the people who look upon themselves
as the intellectual Upper House of Civiliza-
tion in Germany and elsewhere have long
since given up the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, and have taken up the logical
God of Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Nietzsche.
This God was a brilliant discovery of the
thinkers. He could be made to fetch and
carry in a very perfect manner. He created
no complications in any department of
science, from geology to anthropometrics.
He had no power over the laws of nature —
that is, over the hasty generalizations of the
metaphysicians. He was, in the matter of
miracles, more helpless than an erysipelas-
laden surgeon of the 'fifties or than a gar-
dener with a watering-pot. In matters of
statecraft He was easily mobilized and was
naturally anxious to be on the side of the
big battalions.

The place his predecessor had so pic-
turesquely filled in the history of the world
had to be filled ; and at once it was filled or

28 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

claimed by the "State" (with a capital S).
You do not need reminding of this. Indeed,
you are wondering why I am uttering plati-
tudes. But I am merely trying to tell the
truth ; for to-day as I write two million men
are struggling together in the garden of
Europe because you, and such as you, refuse
to eat the saving salt of platitudes.

Let me go on. Having no God worth
adoring, you gave the glory to the State.
Have you not read those very pitiful modern
handbooks on ethics, wherein everything is
deduced from self-preservation, and the State
is the be-all and end-all of human action,
and, therefore, of morality ? We praised
this thing when we saw it quickening in the
Japanese. We curse this thing when we
feel it reddening the plains of little Belgium
with blood of your spilling.

" L'dtat : c'est dieu."

The formula used to be "Letat: c'est
moi." It will be seen that the last state of
the formula is worse than the first. The

OPEN LETTER TO KAISER WILLIAM 29

State is an end that justifies, yea, sanctifies,
all means. Little states must suffer if they
stand in the way of a great nation hot with
war-lust. Treaties are but the superstitions
of fools who still believe in God, conscience,
and the ten Commandments. But what
have omnipotent States to do with an omni-
potent God? What need have statesmen of
a conscience? And who is powerful enough
to compel a Kaiser with a Commandment ?

Let me set down, lest we forget it, what
your Chancellor is reported to have said in
the Reichstag on August 4, whether with or
without a chorus of " Hoch," I cannot say.

"Gentlemen [sic], we are now in a state
of necessity ; and necessity knows no law.
Our troops have occupied Luxemburg, and
perhaps are already on Belgian soil.

" Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dic-
tates of international law.

" It is true that the French Government
has declared at Brussels that France is will-
ing to respect the neutrality of Belgium as

30 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

long as her opponent respects it. We knew,
however, that France stood ready for the in-
vasion. A French movement upon our flank
upon the lower Rhine might have been dis-
astrous.

" So we were compelled to over-ride the
just protest of the Luxemburg and Belgian
Goverments.

"The wrong — I speak openly — that we
are committing we will endeavour to make
good as soon as our military goal has been
reached. Anyone who is threatened as we
are threatened, and is fighting tor his highest
possessions, can have only one thought —
how he is to hack his way through."

This speech would be true even if it had
never been spoken. The Reichstag might
never have heard it. But the men in the
trenches at Liege have heard it — and have
died of it.

Your plea — 1 say your plea, for the ideas
are yours and your Chancellor's, even if the
words are his alone — your plea is that "neces-

OPEN LETTER TO KAISER WILLIAM 31

sity has no law." It is a strange plea from
the Home of the Higher Criticism. When
some of us, old-fashioned believers, urge the
fact of miracles your wise men say, " Miracles
cannot happen. A miracle is against law.
And law is supreme."

When, however, some of us urge the supre-
macy of law, by supporting the rights of a
little treaty-guaranteed nation, your war-
men say, " Treaties are not to the point.
We need Belgium. And when an Imperial
nation has a need, not law, but the Imperial
nation is supreme."

Have you not also reflected that a nation's
first duty is not to keep its life, but to keep
its word ? Your war- men plead : " We
must break our word or we shall die." I do
not believe that a nation that keeps its word
can die. But if it died in keeping its plighted
troth, its death would be the redemption of
modern civilization. Its treachery can only
be the crime of Cain, that turns every man's
hand against the criminal.

32 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Kaiser William, you are not mad ; you
are merely consistent. You have gone the
whole way of your premises. You have not
scrupled to draw the conclusion in a mawkish
dread of the red aftermath.

Be of good cheer. Many a man who is
hounding you with curses is secretly enjoy-
ing your deep, deep draughts of war's red
wine. Behind your premises are the " intel-
lectuel elite " of Europe, who have filled the
land with the cultured cry of " Down with
the unfit !" Your Kaiser-like cry was the
more effective, twelve hours' ultimatum to a
little people — my brothers for three years —
who for over a century have never shed a
drop of human blood save in defence of
honour and God !

Kaiser William, for the last time let me
say how I pity you, and will pity you, con-
quered or conqueror ; for if conquered, you
are like to lose your kingdom, and if con-
queror, you are like to lose your soul.

Meanwhile, we little people, who still long

OPEN LETTER TO KAISER WILLIAM 33

to keep faith with the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, will lift up hands of hope
and prayer to the God of Truth, the Lord
God of Hosts — for there is no other God
but He, and any king or kingdom who
would sit on His throne is an idol with feet
of clay, " appointed unto death."

PITY, PACIFISM, AND THE
KAISER

PITY, PACIFISM, AND THE
KAISER

A SECOND OPEN LETTER

When last 1 wrote to you God gave me
the strength to have pity on you. In that
act I now feel that I was greater than I
knew.

But it seems a long, weary time since you
stirred me to pity. Meanwhile, much water
has flowed under London Bridge, and much
blood has kneaded the sand of Belgium into
clay.

Every Belgian slain — don't start, man of
blood and iron, you distract me, and there
is worse to come — every Belgian slain is a
Belgian murdered. I put it to you in this
way : If you are responsible for this mur-

37

38 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

derous war with Belgium, then you are
responsible for every murdered Belgian.

God pity me, for I no longer pity you I
All the stores of pity housed in my heart
have long since been emptied by the
trenches of Liege, by the stricken hamlets
in the Meuse land, by the sights and sounds
of hoggish war-lust ravening a little, gentle
people.

I no longer pity you, lest the simple
people whose ways are all straight might
take me to be in sympathy with mortal sin.
You were bound through treaty and con-
science— and, therefore, through honour and
justice — to spare, and even to protect,
Belgium. You are trying to teach us that
justice is but a primeval and belated device
for protecting the weak — that is, the unfit —
and that honour, even when strengthened
by treaty, is " a scrap of paper " of no value
to a people " hacking its way through."

I no longer pity you, lest I should be
tempted, and be overcome, by the Satan of

PITY, PACIFISM, AND THE KAISER 39

injustice who once boasted to a hunger-
weakened man that he had the earth and
all its kingdoms in his keeping. I know
that on justice alone do the nations stand.
But in the matter of retributive justice I do
not know where you stand. I only know
that if Belgium meted out to you the justice
you have meted to it, Germany would lose
its Kaiser as tragically as Austria lost its
Crown Prince. Don't start, man of blood
and iron ; I am not advocating assassina-
tion, I am only translating the ultimatum,
Liege, Vise, Louvain, into language you can
understand and fear.

I no longer pity you, Kaiser Wilhelm,
pacifist though I am, because you have
made me eat my words. Again and again
have I vented my hate of war by saying
publicly that a priest was nearly always at
his worst when blessing before a battle or
giving thanks after a glorious victory. Yet
have I not brought tears to the eyes of war-
faring lads whom I suddenly greeted with

40 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

" God bless you " ? Have I not stood bare-
headed on a deserted promontory of Rugby
platform in reverence for a trainload of men
for the front ? And have I not searched
the papers for news of a fight ending with
the capture or slaughter — God forgive me —
of your Brandenburgers ?

Yet I am, like you, a pacifist. Don't
interrupt me, for a pacifist you certainly are.
Indeed, you are a fanatic for peace. But
your peace is to be the stillness of an up-
rooted forest which the whirlwind has over-
thrown, and for that vision of peace you are
fanatically prepared to kill men and to over-
ride justice.

I no longer pity you, Kaiser William, for
it is now my duty to encourage the brave
men who face your fangs in order to cage
you from your prey. When I have blessed
these heroes I send them forth in pursuit of
you with heartening truth. I recall the fact
that once upon a time there was a man who
terrorized a peace-loving people. " No one

PITY, PACIFISM, AND THE KAISER 41

could bind him, not even with chains, and
no one could tame him." The man had a
devil. When the devils were driven out,
they went into a herd of swine and perished
in the water. To me, accustomed to see
historical events in parable, the lesson is
complete and detailed. It fits in every
detail — the untamable fool who cut himself,
the swine, the end by water. Thank God
the Navy is still intact !

I no longer pity you, Kaiser William,
because for three years I was taught phil-
osophy at Louvain, and your guttural Pan-
Germanism has ravaged both. You may
not know it, but philosophy is the love of
wisdom or truth for its own sake, and you
have loved truth only as a means of hasten-
ing the reign of the Hohenzollerns. Har-
nack, whom you have loaded with honours,
wrote a book on " The Essence of Christi-
anity," and it was translated into English.
Its aim was to show that Luther was
a better Christian than Christ, and that

42 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Harnack was a better Lutheran than Luther,
and, incidentally, that the Almighty might
have made a better world of it if he had
only consulted a Hohenzollern. No wonder
this colossal self-conceit made a bonfire of
one of the most celebrated centres of learn-
ing in the world.

I no longer pity you, Kaiser William,
because your brutal hand of war has shed
the blood not only of philosophy, but of
religion. The God I thought I worshipped
has appeared so often and under such
degrading circumstances in your official
speeches and dispatches that 1 am ashamed
to speak to or of Him. You have contrived
to make the God of wisdom seem ridiculous,
the God of armies feeble, the God of justice
torpid, the God of mercy cruel. You have
proclaimed to the world that He is wonder-
fully supporting you in your blood lust, as
if the King of kings and Lord of lords had
been proud to take the shilling as a subject
of Kaiser William the Second. You have

PITY, PACIFISM, AND THE KAISER 43

asked Germany and civilization to believe
that He, who would not that a jot or tittle
of the law should perish, has blessed you in
tearing up sacred treaties ; that He, who
loves justice, should be pleased with the
slaughter of a sinless ewe-lamb ; that He,
who made all the world and the science
thereof, is glad to smell the incense of
charred universities and burning books.

I no longer pity you, Kaiser William,
but I ask you to pity me, for I am sorely
tempted to give up prayer to the God
whom you have degraded by your prayers
and evil works. I say to myself, " How
can I pray to God ? How can I dare
remind Him of a duty which He can forget
only by forgetting the very elements of
justice ? If I beseech Him to do justice by
striking the strikers of Belgium and by
scorning the scorners of truth and justice, is
this not to insult Him?" My prayers for
the moment will be but the stifled throes of
hate, the checked outbursts of revenge, until

44 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

such time as in Louvain or Berlin the fight-
ing men I have blessed and sped to war
may sing Te Deum over the capture of the
Wild Boar from the Schwartz-wald.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE
GERMAN PEOPLE

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE
GERMAN PEOPLE

Some weeks ago I addressed two letters to
the man whom you have called German
Emperor, though rarely Emperor of Ger-
many. The letters were meant to give the
wretched man an opportunity to convince
the twentieth century and civilization that
he was not a barbarian of the Flint Age,
but a human being with elementary ideas, if
not of mercy, at least of justice.

As you see, in the smoking ruins of
Louvain and Rheims, the opportunities for
grace which the man has received have been
to no purpose. They have been as useless
to stay him in his outburst of blood as a
bowl of milk might be to a man-eating tiger
in search of human quarry.

47

48 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

But if final impenitence seems to have
laid hold of the man whom you have chosen
to call Emperor, there is no reason for
thinking that the people over whom he ruled
are in his state of obduracy.

Belgium has suffered from his war-lust ;
France has suffered from his war-lust ; but
the sufferings of Belgium and France are as
nothing to the wrongs he has wrought
on the German people. Belgium has lost
Louvain, France has lost Rheims ; both have
lost thousands of their bravest sons — yea,
and daughters ! — but, ye German people,
have ye not lost your honour ?

Where is your old fame amongst the
nations ? Where is the sympathy ye stirred
up in the world when the eagle of Corsica
held you in his talons ? Where is the joy
that welcomed the mysticism of the Rhine-
land ? Where is the music ye sang and all
the world sang after you when they would
sing nobly in their hours of inspiration ?

Ye had a place apart at every gathering

OPEN LETTER TO GERMAN PEOPLE 49

of the great family that was once Europe.
Ye were a blue-eyed mystic, enkindling and
melting our hearts by fragments of the songs
you sang in your dark forests of pine.

And now . . .

Ye have still a place apart in Europe — a
place of shame ; a place of perhaps eternal
disgrace. Your shrine has been overthrown,
your sanctuary defiled. And no enemy has
done this ; but the man whom ye honoured
as Emperor.

A wise man has said of you that, though
you have the most dogged brains in Europe
so that there is nothing you might not learn,
yet there is nothing you will learn save what
you are minded that men should teach. I
know not, therefore, whether you will take
my plighted oath that the people of this
island were bound by a thousand ties of
religious and racial sentiment to be on your
side. Millions of the quiet tillers of English
soil and workers in English mills almost
idealized a people whom they thanked for

50 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

what they looked upon as the best drops of
their blood and the best beliefs in their
religion. To declare war on you was like
laying violent hands on their kith and kin.
It seemed almost the crime of fratricide. I
passed through the land on the day when
war was declared. It was almost a land of
the dead. No cheer went up from it ; no
gladness visited its troubled eyes. 1 could
only compare the tragedy in their souls to
the tragedy in the soul of him who said
" Et tu, Brute," in the moment of a great
betrayal.

Believe me, then, for I speak the truth.
This land has taken up the sword against
you with a chill about its heart. Your
dealings with the little ewe-lamb of Europe
have turned reverence, not indeed into
revenge, but into hunger and thirst for
justice. Our little island breeds sportsmen,
who love a game only on condition that it is
Fair Play. But Belgium is there with its
Foul Play to goad our gentlefolk into a

OPEN LETTER TO GERMAN PEOPLE 51

spirit which makes them an invincible
host.

I write to you now that you may know
what to do and what not to do when the
man who has betrayed Belgium and You
shall plead for justice at your hands.

Let me give you a very sober counsel
against the day when the person, William
Hohenzollern, is in the keeping of the
German people and his palace is in the
keeping of the Allied Armies, with Belgian
sentries at the great gate.

Your betrayer must be given the justice
of a German trial by jury. You will seek a
verdict on one point alone — to wit, whether
it was the Emperor or his ministers that
were responsible for the crime against inter-
national law committed by the invasion of a
neutral State, and especially of a neutral
State which Germany had bound itself to
protect. The point of fact will not be
judged by you. It lies patent to the world
in the desert round Liege, Namur, Lou vain,

52 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Termonde. You cannot excuse this crime
against the law of nations and the law of
God. To excuse it would lay you open to
the fearful charge of aiding the Emperor or
his ministers in a crime crying to Heaven
for vengeance.

In self-defence, therefore, you, the people
whom this man or his ministers have dis-
graced, must judge whether the blame is to
be laid upon him or his ministers.

It will be a tragedy of justice. The
Emperor will be pitted against his ministers ;
the " man " against his men ; and each will
seek to lay the blame upon the other. Be
prepared for revelations that will astound
the ear of Europe. Be ready to record
evidence that will shock the conscience even
of the German people. Let the accused of
both sides have counsel for defence. See
that every form of justice is kept lest a
loophole for the criminals friend be left by
your over-zeal. Nothing is so terrible as
justice. You will have no need to suppress

OPEN LETTER TO GERMAN PEOPLE 53

or manipulate facts. You will need only to
record them. Then when the facts have
told their story to your astounded ear, you,
the people of Germany, will judge between
the Emperor and his ministers.

Your judgment will be a sentence of
death, for the charge is a capital charge. It
is not merely a charge of treason, but
of murder. If William Hohenzollern, of
Potsdam, broke into your house in 10, Gus-
tavustrasse, and, in his efforts to raid the
house next door, murdered your son and
your wife, he would be tried. If found
guilty he would meet a violent death. Is it
a less crime to take up a course of criminal
action which the culprit knew would result
in the death not of two or of twenty, but
of thousands ? Is a man less a murderer
because he sheds more blood and sheds it
more deliberately?

You, the German people, have already
shed blood enough to pay your share in the
crime. The " contemptible little army " on

54 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

your right wing saw to that. But the man
or men who planned and ordered the murder
of thousands of Belgians are not dead in the
heaps that litter the road from Mons to
Rheims. They must be sentenced to capital
punishment.

If not, how can we ever hope to safeguard
the " scraps of paper " on which the safety
of the little nations depends ? International
agreements and the decisions of the Hague
Conference will be worthless if a man with
the maggot of world- empire may hack his
way to power through an inoffending people.
Robbery with violence — yea, robbery with
murder, is not usually treated with leniency.
Until it receives its reward of punishment,
the peace-abiding nations of the world must
pass sleepless nights, tortured by the dread
of the robber who slays whoever comes
between him and his booty.

Be a judge, then. Bring in a verdict.
And let the Allies decide how best your
verdict may be carried out, for the lasting

OPEN LETTER TO GERMAN PEOPLE 55

good of the German people, the full com-
pensation of Belgian loss, and the honour of
offended international law.

Let the convicted culprit meet his doom.
And may God have mercy on his soul.

A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO THE
CHILDREN OF GERMANY

A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO THE
CHILDREN OF GERMANY

I am writing this so that it may reach your
home by the last post on Christmas Eve.
Your mother will keep it until you have
sung your first Christmas carol and have
uncovered the glittering Christmas tree
with its forest of Christmas gifts. Sit down
somewhere near the little Crib of Bethle-
hem, and by the half-light of the lanterns
on the wall read with tears what I have
written with tears.

Nowhere in the wide, wide world is
Christmas such a feast of joy as in your
beloved Germany. The Babe of Bethle-
hem, His Mother and His foster-father,
once homeless and unwanted in their own

59

60 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Eastern land, have been welcomed in the
forest lands beyond the Rhine.

No wonder ! Years and years ago your
forefathers dwelt in the dark pine forests
that covered your land. There they lived
by making war on wild beasts. When
wild beasts grew scarce they lived by
making war on the people who had cut
down the pine woods and had learned how
to grow wheat and the grape.

Those were dark gloomy days. A time
of war is a time of tears for those that win
as for those that lose. Many of the brave
men and women that lived in your dark
woods longed for a time when they could
begin the day without dread of slaying or
being slain.

One year, news came to them that a
Child had been born and had lived, had
been put to death by men because He loved
men too much. Moreover, it was said
that this Child and Man, Jesus, was a God,
like Thor.

A CHRISTMAS LETTER 61

Like Thor ! But how unlike Thor, the
Destroyer with his hammer of iron. This
gentle God Jesus had never destroyed any-
one or anything but Himself. All the frail,
maimed, outcast things of the world came
to Him to be cured or consoled. He found
the world dark with night ; and when He
died He left the world in the quivering but
assured light of dawn.

No wonder that the story of Jesus of
Golgotha and Bethlehem ran through your
beloved country like good news. It flew
north and south, east and west, like tidings
of a victory.

No people welcomed it more ; for no
people needed it more. It came unto your
forefathers as the white snow comes in
winter to your woods. When autumn is
dead, winter at once kills all the colours of
your forest trees. There are no daffodils
or primroses to sing of spring. The violets
are but a clot of sodden green on the soil.
The wild rose is a mere memory. Above

62 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

your heads the sky becomes a plate of
sullen lead. The leafless branches of the
trees are as dark roots laid bare. Under
your feet the sodden earth has no beauty
for the eye, and only the plaint of death
for the ear.

Then comes the snow ! Silently whilst
you sleep at night it falls on the dark earth,
on the leafless trees. When you wake on
the morn you look out through your
window upon a new heaven and a new
earth !

Like snow at midnight falling stilly on
the dark earth came Jesus to your beloved
land. It was never the same land again.
Your people were never again the same
people. They had heard good news ; they
had seen a vision.

For love of the little Babe of Bethlehem
they began to cut down the pine-trees, to
plant the vine and sow the wheat for
sacrifice, to play, to sing. Christmas by
Christmas they brought Him gift-laden

A CHRISTMAS LETTER 63

saplings of pine and many carols and the
sweeter music of children's laughter.

Such sweetness was woven into your
songs that all the world listened to your
singing. Such loveliness adorned your
Christmas that we, beyond the seas, came
almost to think that Jesus was born in a
German forest where the pines are green
and the winter is a depth of white.

Alas ! Thor did not die when Jesus
gave Germany its soul. Thor has come
back again ; with his hammer and his
destruction.

Look across the Rhine, children ; look at
the homes of your brothers and sisters in
Belgium. Many are but a heap of charred
ruins. Many will have no fire on the
hearth when the Christ comes at Christmas.
One million two hundred thousand of the
simple folk of Belgium are exiles as you
read these words. Never has the world
seen so many homeless wanderers, with
their fears and tears.

64 EUROPE^ EWE-LAMB

You weep, and ask, " Who has driven
them from their warm hearth in this wild,
bitter weather ?"

I answer guardedly, " THOR." It is
this dark God of power and pride who has
made the garden of Belgium into a smoul-
dering wild. Thor comes to take the life
of all who stand in his way. He has been
abroad in Belgium for four months, and it
is as if the Prince of Darkness had made
Belgium a province of Hell.

But, dear children of Germany, what has
Thor wrought on your side of the Rhine ?
Even deeper ill.

Once upon a time, when Christmas was
Christmas to Germany, and Christ, not
Thor, was God, the Rhine was a thronged
waterway between north and south and its
banks were covered with homes of prayer
and open-handed charity. Now it is a hive
of forts where men are trained and armed
to slay. Once your beloved land, having
seen beautiful things in its dreams and

A CHRISTMAS LETTER 65

prayer, made beautiful copies of them in
its carved wood and stone. Now your land
is darkened by the smoke of factories forg-
ing far-reaching weapons of death. Once
Germany sang its carols and cradle-songs
whilst Europe listened spell-bound. Now
Thor has put on its lips a Hymn of Hate.
Once the light and joy and love of Bethle-
hem flowed like a golden Rhine through-
out the land where your forefathers dwelt.

Now

But tears blur my sight. The pen
quivers in my ringers. Beneath the window
where I now write I see an exiled Belgian
mother carrying her babe heavily as if foot-
sore after many weary days upon the road.
She clasps her little one tightly to her
breast, like one who would shield it from
some awful doom. There is no hope any-
where in her face. But her eyes glow with
a smouldering terror ; for in spite of the
kindly folk who welcome her to their
homes, she still sees, as in a dark dream,

5

66 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

her beloved Belgian home shattered and
burned by the men of your land who have
chosen Thor and his hammer rather than
the gentle Babe of Bethlehem and His —
Cross !

HELP BELGIUM

HELP BELGIUM

There never was a nation that needed help
as Belgium now needs it. There never was
a nation that has helped itself throughout
the ages as Belgium has helped herself.
This staining of Belgium's soil with re-
deeming blood is not the tragedy of the
little ewe-lamb of Europe. The greater
tragedy is the redeeming sweat and blood
that Belgian men and women have poured
into the soil in the years of peace, before
the further tragedy of war began. The
world has never known a people of such
tragic toil. We are told by sober statis-
ticians who know, that the soil of Belgium
is on the whole almost the most unfertile of
Europe. God made Belgium a sandy dune
and plain. The sweat and blood of Bel-

69

70 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

gians have made God's desert into the
garden of Europe. The " Civilizers " have
brought back with blood the primeval
wilderness !

Who ever heard of Belgians begging for
themselves ? Who ever saw Belgians, with
outstretched hands, beseeching bread they
had not themselves toiled to earn ? I lived
three years in Belgium — a beggar for its
alms of learning ; yet I never found the
Belgians eloquent to beg but to bestow.
They bestowed their best upon the desert
soil. If the sand they called Fatherland
poured out its gifts more lavishly than any
other land in the world — more even than
the unctuous self-assertive land that is now
a kleptomaniac in Belgium — it is because
the tillers of the soil had already given
the soil more than it could repay.

Millet, in all his later masterpieces,
painted men and women, sometimes at
prayer, sometimes at work, but always bent
over the soil. He meant to suggest that

HELP BELGIUM 71

they were redeeming the soil and their soul
by their toil, and that they were redeeming
their toil by their prayer. I never saw a
land where the redemption of work — and
the work of redemption — seemed such a
lavish national product.

These things are good to remember when
we, whom Belgium's wounds have saved
from wounds, stretch out our hands in
beseeching beggary for the men and
women who have neither the heart nor the
tongue to beseech. Neither Flemings nor
Walloons speak our tongue. Their one
splendid utterance in these latter days is
that, in defence of honour and of us, they
have fallen upon famine and exile, and even
death.

To their glorious dead we can and should
give the alms of honour and intercession.
For the moment, however, our more urgent
duty is not towards the dead, but towards
the living, whose life may even become
worse than death. Famine is now crouch-

72 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

ing behind the devastating guns, ready for
a heavier devastation. This is not rhetoric ;
or only such rhetoric as the naked truth
scatters when it goes forth to slay.

Famine ! This is the horrible truth now
overshadowing that little land that once
was, and now is but little more than an
imperishable memory. In such supreme
anguish the soul finds something akin to
solace in making its own the inspired
mourning of the prophet : " If I go forth
into the fields, behold the slain with the
sword. And if I enter into the city, behold
them that are consumed with famine. The
prophet also and the priest are gone into a
land which they knew not."*

The land into which the prophets and
priests and harried folk of Belgium have
fled is minded to stay the famine that is
couching to spring. Readers of this cry
of a lover of Belgium will give open-
handedly to the " Shilling Fund " which is

* Jer. xiv. 18

HELP BELGIUM 73

daily raising its protecting walls against the
approach of famine. The Catholics of this
country have championed many noble causes
with splendid generosity. None has made
so irresistible an appeal as this mute cry
of a noble people for food and clothing
wherewith to stay the hunger and naked-
ness that have met them along the path of
honour kept and civilization saved.

BRITAIN'S DUTY TO BELGIUM

BRITAIN'S DUTY TO BELGIUM*

" Behold, their valiant ones cry without,
The ambassadors of peace weep bitterly.
The highways lie waste.

The wayfaring man ceaseth.

" He hath broken the covenant,
He hath despised the cities,
He regardeth not man.

" The land mourneth and languisheth,

Lebanon is ashamed and withereth away,
Sharon is like a desert,

And Bashan and Carmel shake off their leaves.

" Now will I arise, saith the Lord ;
Now will I lift Myself up,
Now will I be exalted.""

Isa, xxxiii. 7-10.

Let me tell you, if I can, the noble
and pitiful story of a little ewe-lamb —

* A sermon preached at St. Michael's, Belmont,
Hereford.

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78 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Europe's ewe -lamb — brave and beloved
Belgium.

I am a man of peace ; yet I shall have to
speak of war — yea, urge the laggards on to
war — because Belgium and Britain call upon
me by every best name to lift up my voice.
For three years, for three swift unforget-
table years, I sat on the wooden benches of
Louvain University. I am a child of this
nursing - mother of scholars, heroes and
saints, and I should be an apostate, a
coward, and a sinner if the smoking ruins
of Louvain and Belgium did not burn in
my blood and thunder on my tongue.

More than that: I should be a mdngrel
son of these islands of heroes if 1 let Bel-
gium bleed to death for our sake and I kept
silence like a glutted hound. For, mark
you, on the day after Waterloo a century
since, when we, the people of these islands,
rearranged the geography of Europe for a
hundred years, we knew that our first line
of defence against a Continental attack

BRITAIN'S DUTY TO BELGIUM 79

must be on the Continent. It was not
Dover, and Deal and Chatham that guarded
Britain. It was the Meuse, and Liege and
Belgium. In our instinct for self-preserva-
tion we deliberately set Belgium as a watch-
dog at our door to detect and challenge the
foe we feared.

Brethren, look eastward and see the faith-
ful hound ! No man can say that it has
torn up covenants or swerved from duty or
yielded to fear. When the wild boar
came from his Black Forest and gave
Belgium twelve hours in which to choose
between certain dishonour and almost cer-
tain death, Belgium did not take twelve
minutes to choose the narrow blood-stained
way of death and leave dishonour to the
wild boar. Covenants and treaties have
been torn up by the great hulking beast
in its war lust. Belgium has become a
pearl mud-trampled under the feet of swine.
The fair land about the Meuse mourneth
and languisheth. Liege is ashamed and

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withereth away. Louvain is like a desert.
And Namur and Brussels have shaken off
her leaves.

* * * * *

A prophet is a man of plain, straight
speech. And to-day every preacher of the
Gospel stands in the place of the prophets.
Woe to us if we call good evil and evil
good. Woe to us if we see the ruin of such
sanctities of life as culture, justice, freedom,
loyalty, and we do not fulfil our ultimate
duty of cursing, in the name of Him
whose curses are amongst the sanctities of
history.

When the Kaiser's myriad conscripts bat-
tered the forts of Liege it was not a crime
against Belgium that was wrought out in
blood, but a crime against civilization.

I can hardly bear to speak of what was
once Louvain ; for Louvain is now only a
smouldering heap of ashes ; and Louvain
was a kind mother to me when I sought
learning from its lips.

BRITAIN'S DUTY TO BELGIUM 81

Now that I have seen many peoples and
noble and rich seats of learning I love
Louvain all the more. It alone amongst
the universities of the world was supported
by the voluntary offerings of the people —
the pence and farthings of the tillers who
made their infertile soil the world's fair
garden. The fees one paid for learning
were such as one might in a rich country
to have one's boots cleaned. Its rector had
hardly as much as the head master of a
second-class grammar school. Its pro-
fessors, though of international fame, had
less than a first assistant in an elementary
school. In its irrepressible humanity it
taught everything from theology to road-
making and brewing — from how to make
a saint to how to make beer. But most
of all it taught the stranger who came to
its midst the noble art of generosity with-
out suspicion. For centuries it had taught
strangers from every quarter of the world.
It had no imperial ambitions like the

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82 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

narrow-minded pan-Germanists who have
turned this fine gold into mire. Its only
imperial instinct was to make the whole
world its debtor by the open -handedness of
intellectual alms.

Against this, then, German enlighten-
ment— that is, German cleverness that had
not lost its reason but had lost its heart —
could do nothing but take revenge. The
little people were not qualified to be Ger-
many's scullions, but to be Germany's
masters, if Germany — I mean Kaiserism
and Pan-Germanism — would be content to
own any man master. As the wild boar
could not win this precious thing that was
Belgium, it could only trample it in a
hoggish wallowing of rage.

The wars of centuries have been fought
in Belgium without spoiling the untold
treasures of Belgian art. It remained for
the Huns trained by William and Haeckel
and Eucken — who are now cursing England
— to stamp their hobnailed war boots on

BRITAIN'S DUTY TO BELGIUM 83

the limbs and eyes of this ewe-lamb of
Europe.

You know of these horrors, you men and
women from the land of the Wye. You
know that Belgium's cry is : " To-day for
us, and to-morrow for you." Liege is fallen
that London may fall. Louvain is in ashes
that Oxford may burn. The Meuse is a
German river that the Wye may be a
German river. Our troops abroad are not
defending Belgium or France, but defend-
ing England. Our faithful watch-dog is
dying rather than betray us. We must
die rather than betray it. So rouse ye,
men and women of the Wye land.
Women, teach men to be men, if they
have lost the art of being British in the
hour of Britain's danger. And men, re-
member that ingratitude has never been
a vice of your fathers. Your billhooks and
long-bows made the invaders of the Holy
Land tremble. Rouse ye to as noble and
holy a war on behalf of your own freedom and

84 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the freedom of a faithful watch-hound that
is bleeding from death-blows aimed at you.

And when you arise you will not stand
alone :

" Now will I arise, saith the Lord ;
Now will I lift Myself up ;
Now will I be exalted."

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY

A BELGIAN MOTHERS ROSARY*

A Protestant Soldier's Story

1 heard the following true story at Hawkes-
yard, Rugeley, in the county of Stafford,
England, on Sunday, the 18th day of April,
1915.

It touched me deeply. I could not rest
until I had written it down, that it might
enter into its heaven-given apostolate and
might touch others as it had touched me.
In fairness towards truth and towards my
readers, let me remind them that no story is
ever retold in exactly the same words in
which it has been heard. Moreover, a few
trivial details, not of the substance of this
story, are yet set down, because they are of

* Catholic Times, June 25, 1915.
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88 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the substance of that deep emotion which
the story awoke within me. The story,
then, is not a creation of my fancy. Alas !
my fancy is not equal to the task of creating
tales so sorrowful and fair. But the story is
history. It really happened ; and because
it is a true story, and very fair and lovable, I
have set it down in my own halting words,
that others may be moved as I was moved
and may weep as I have wept.

Some few Sundays ago, Miss Agnes Beton,
a somewhat timid convert to the Catholic
Faith, accepted an invitation to spend the
day with her sister's family. Although these
non-Catholic relations were usually thought-
less enough to make the visits a social
purgatory by the bitterness of their attacks
on the Catholic Church, Miss Beton accepted
the invitation, because a son of the family
was at home on a few days' holiday from the
trenches around Ypres.

During dinner Miss Beton 's sister, the

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY 89

mother of the family, began to make one of
her usual biting remarks about the bigotry
of Popery. Suddenly her soldier son broke
into her unfinished gibe, saying, with flushed
cheek and in measured words :

" Mother, you must not speak like that of
Catholics whilst I am in the house ! "

The effect of this unexpected speech was
as if a Zeppelin bomb had dropped through
the ceiling upon the dinner-table. The
dinner-folk were speechless. It was obviously
left to the speaker to go on speaking.

He went on, uninvited : " You see,
mother, you have never been out of your
own country ; but I have been to Belgium."
He began to fumble for something in one of
the pockets of his tunic. " And I have seen
Catholics living, and dying."

" Look at this ! " he said, with an under-
tone of tenderness ringing through his words.
There was no need to ask them to look.
Already every eye was fixed on what he had
just brought forth from the depths of a

90 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

breast-pocket in his soldier's tunic. He was
holding up what was, certainly, a very
remarkable weapon for a Protestant soldier
to carry. It was an old finger- worn rosary ;
not a smart mother-of-pearl, gold-linked
rosary such as " my lady " passes through
her delicate scented fingers when she prays
in the West End, but such as a grandmother
of the people might thumb all day in her
corner by the fire in " Beggar's Alley."

At the sight of this old rosary it was as if
a second Zeppelin bomb had fallen amidst
the chaos left by the first. The dinner-folk
were astonished into speechlessness. All
their reserves of attack and defence were at
once paralyzed by this apparition of the old
finger-worn beads in the fingers of their
soldier brother.

At last the mother of the soldier son said
with a spurt : " Child — who — gave you
that?" Her words were shot with terror.
Speech when it came to this mother was a
supreme throe of bravery. To judge from

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY 91

the anguish in her voice she might have
been asking her son, " Who gave you those
deadly wounds ? "

Something like a swift wave of relief
flitted across the soldier's bronzed face as he
listened to his mother's words. He asked,
almost eagerly : " Would you really like to
know how I came by it ? "

« Yes !"— " Of course !"— " Tell us !" arose
in chorus from all sides of the table.

The soldier put his beads down with
gentleness beside his plate. He began
quietly. He seemed to be talking to the
beads rather than to his listeners.

" You will remember that 1 left for the
Front last January." All remembered ; but
there was one, the mother, who seemed to
think it must have been a year since. " When
I arrived at the trenches near Ypres our
sergeant told me and the other new-comers
that there was an old Belgian peasant woman
whom we were to be careful not to hurt.
She lived almost within the fire-swept zone

92 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

between the English and the German lines.
Her wretched hut was little more than a
ruin, too tottering and useless to be shelled.
But she would not quit its walls. Again and
again our men had asked her to leave it.
They had even tried to frighten her into
giving it up by telling her that one day it
would be shelled and she would be killed.
But she pretended not to understand, and
replied in a Flemish phrase which we had
heard often enough to learn by heart : ' My
son Joseph is in the trenches somewhere, and
I must be near at hand if he wants me.'

" At last our men gave up the impossible
task of dislodging this woman from her
stronghold. It was their only admitted
defeat.

" But they seem to have made an unspoken
vow that this woman must be cared for as if
she was their own mother."

He stopped his story for a moment to look
across the dinner-table at another mother.
It was almost a catastrophe. This English

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY 93

mother was already in tears, hopelessly-
defeated by the first few opening sentences
of her son's pitiful tale.

The man of battles might soon have been
even as his mother. But he pulled himself
together by lifting his eyes from his mother
and turning them towards the old finger- worn
beads of the Belgian peasant woman. He
had forgotten where he was in the story.
But he began as a brave soldier is taught to
begin, at once, and anywhere.

" Many a night have I crawled out beyond
our trenches to give her a basket of food for
the next day's meal." Here Dorothy, the
" baby " of eight summers, was observed to
wipe her left eye with a corner of her pinafore
held in her left hand, and to put back upon
her plate a rosy apple she had just tasted.
The soldier smiled a little gravely towards
Dorothy and marched stolidly onwards
through his story.

" The chaps of the regiment would almost
quarrel who should take food to 'Old Mother.'

94 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Every morning we looked out towards her
hovel of a home to see if she was still
safe."

Another crisis seemed to threaten. This
time it started up unaccountably on the side
of the story-teller himself. Rallying himself,
he took the beads into his hand, and drew
himself up in his chair as if to " Attention."
His voice had sunk into a deep, slow move-
ment, like a soldier's funeral.

" One morning when the mist was lifting
I looked towards our mother's hovel. It was
still standing, and I felt glad at the sight.
But suddenly my heart began to knock
against my breast. I looked again towards
the hovel. About a yard or two from the
remnants of the brick wall I could distinctly
see a heap or bundle that had not been there
the day before. I watched it through the
grey mist. It never moved. It seemed
dead, like the earth on which it lay.

" I called another mate of mine to look.
Neither of us had the heart to say to the

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY 95

other what we feared. For a moment the fog
lifted and let the sunshine fall on the bundle.

" ' It's the old brown shawl !' I gasped.

" * She's dead !' groaned Jack.

" ' Sergeant,' I said, ' let Jack and me go
and fetch " Old Mother " back.' He bit his
lips, nodded his head, and walked quickly
away — to hide something he didn't want us
to see.

" We were soon crawling over the ground.
The mist had settled down again. For
the life of me, mother, 1 couldn't say now
whether the Germans were firing or not. I
could see only the old brown shawl. I could
hear only Jacks groan, ' She's dead !' And
I know that I crawled for the old brown
shawl as I never ran with the football when
I played outside left wing for the cup.

" Jack and I reached her at last.

" She was cold ; but, thank God, she was
still alive.

"We looked into her eyes — they were
turned in her poor, brown, furrowed brow.

96 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

I took her chilled left hand in mine." Here
he took the old finger-worn beads into his
hands with even greater tenderness than
before. Alone he seemed to be master of
himself. The rest of the dinner-folk were
helpless before his story. It was not a defeat.
It was a rout.

" Child !" said his mother, "did you. . . "

But no one ever knew what this other

mother was minded to say, for it died on her

lips with a great sob, as she buried her head

in her hands.

" . . . I took her hand in mine, as I and
Jack knelt beside her. I rubbed it, like that "
— he stroked the beads gently in his hand —
" to bring back warmth. Jack tried to pour
a drop of brandy between her lips. Then
upon her breast I saw a dark, thickening clot.
I said to Jack, 'Look there — it's all up,
mate.' He groaned : ' Swine ! Curse 'em !'
I knew what he meant, and — God forgive
me — I was glad he meant it.

" But our voices seemed to have been borne

A BELGIAN MOTHER'S ROSARY 97

away into the distances, where the Belgian
mother's soul was hastening deathwards.
Her eyes came back to their wonted place
slowly, as if wounded. She looked at Jack
and me. The pale ghost of a smile flitted
for a moment about her sunken eyes.

"Then with her right hand, which had
been lying helpless at her side — like that " —
he let his hand drop from the table to his
side with a terrifying shock — " she began to
fumble slowly in her wide peasant's pocket.
I thought she wanted to find her big, dark-
blue handkerchief to wipe her brow which
was covered with beads of sweat — like these,"
and he tenderly shook the rosary in his hand.

" But it was not the handkerchief she
wanted ; for when I had taken out my own
and wiped away the death-beads from her
brow, she still fumbled in her pocket.

" At last she found what she sought.
Suddenly she drew from her pocket these old
worn beads !"

He raised them deliberately once more

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98 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

before the eyes of the dinner-folk, and in
almost a harsh voice he gasped rather than
spoke what remained to tell : "... She
raised her head and shoulders . . . from the
wet clay . . . and with her old, furrowed,
brown, dying hand " — he put the beads over
his head — "she put these beads . . . over
my head — like that. Jack and I caught her
in our arms as she fell back. But it was a
blood-stained corpse we caught."

ON HATE

ON HATE

I will undertake the hard task of speaking
on hate. But, to guard myself and my
readers against the essential dangers of
the undertaking, I will speak of hate with
love lurking in my heart.

There are some qualities of soul which,
in the soul's present plight of sin, no man
can have, as patience that is never ruffled
and eyes that are never uncontrolled.
Again, there are some other qualities of
soul that most men, or at least a few, may
have, as courage and content, Lastly, there
are some qualities of soul which all men
must have, for good or ill, as love and
hate.

Hate is a primal instinct of the soul;
nearer the very heart of the soul than any
other instinct except love. Indeed, but for

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102 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

love, hate would be the soul's elemental
activity.

At first sight love and hate seem as far
apart as the right hand and the left, or the
north pole and the south, or day and night.
However, on second sight, it would seem
that hate is not love's opposite, but its
obverse. Inasmuch as a man loves he
hates. No man can love aright until he
hates aright. The deeper his love, the
deeper his hate.

They are unwise, and they not a few,
who think thus of the difference between
love and hate so as to say : " Love is good,
and hate is bad."

How far this opinion strays from the
truth may be judged by recalling the say-
ing of a wise man : " Love that is the roof
of heaven, is the floor of hell." Love is not
of itself good. Some love is good, some
is indifferent, and not a little is of the
pit. All that we may safely say of love
is this, and it is of the nature of a platitude,
to wit : " Good love is good. "

ON HATE 103

The self-same, nothing less and nothing
more, may be said of hate. It is witless
error or wilful lying that could maintain
the thesis: "Hate is bad." This phrase
would mean to the ordinary hearer of it,
"All hate is bad." Now the truth is that
"some hate is bad, some is indifferent, and
some is divine." To liken it unto love we
say: "Bad hate is bad." Nearer to the
heart of truth can we not reach than by
this platitude.

We have hereby established a certain
likeness and even kinship between love
and hate. It is the same here in these
matters of the heart as elsewhere in
matters of the mind. Truth scatters, not
only blessings, but curses. Indeed, as
curses, through being more imperative, are
more strident than blessings, their sound
carries farther. They are, if not a surer,
at least a commoner guide. A man can
hardly fail to come up with the Truth in
this world of omnipresent denial provided
only he will keep his ears open to hear

104 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

" Anathema, Maranatha," and sundry other
curses. Indeed, I myself have made a
strange phrase, which I only understand
in part even after a thousand repetitions.
It is this : " Better the curse of Peter than
the kiss of Judas."

Now, just as Anathema, Maranatha and
the like are not coarse words that are a
vent to foolish anger, but curses that are
a password unto the truth, so is hate itself
a flag fluttering undauntedly on love's
embattlements.

We have said that on second sight hate
is taken not to be love's opposite, but love's
obverse. Now, because truth is not in first
sight nor in second sight, but in a certain
trinity of vision, our third sight largely con-
firms the first and only corrects the blurred
outlines of its intuitions. It is right and it
is final to say that we cannot love without
hating ; nor hate without loving ; yet one
and the same thing we cannot at one and
the same time both love and hate.

ON HATE 105

It is a sign of our decadence that there is
a school of thought so delicate as to look on
a curse as too coarse for the lips and hate
as too inhuman for the heart. As often
happens, they find choice words of Holy
Writ to sponsor the unholiness of their
half-truths. Their lips often speak with
relish the phrase, " God is love." They
do not declare but imply that " Satan is
hate." They forget that if no being loves
as God loves, none hates as God hates.

Hardly has any thinker had the boldness
to explore and survey the land of hate.
Some of the headlong sort have said, not
without a show of truth, that if God is
love, and love is God, then " Hate is Hell."

Another thinker, a poet to boot, and a
resolute hater if ever there was one, has
written in verse and rhyme that over the
murky gates of eternal doom are to be seen
the words : *k The First Love Made Me."

Another, who has written plentifully of
wedded love, is responsible for the saying :

106 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

" Swedenbourg's hell is one in which every-
body is incessantly engaged in the en-
deavour to make everybody else virtuous !"
and this, it will be granted, is a work of love.

Perhaps the geography of love might
lend a little light to the unmapped geo-
graphy of hate. Aquinas and Aristotle,
who so often run as yoke-fellows in things
of the mind, have said that " All love "
(like All Gaul) " is divided into three parts."
The first part is " the love of lust," as when
a man loves wine or horses. The second
part is the "love of simple well-wishing,"
as when a man loves or wishes to give a
cup of water to a criminal justly awaiting
death. The third part is the love of friend-
ship. This is the noblest love, which makes
a community of life between friends in all
matters save their incommunicable points
of view and the things which each must
consume rather than the other.

It may be questioned whether hate is
not divided into these three Grand Duchies

ON HATE 107

of hating. There is assuredly a certain
" hate of lust," or " lust of hate," as when
a man hates ill-cooked food or teeth that
ache, and the like. This hate is normal,
and is a sign of normal health. It may
even be admitted that there is a " hate of
simple ill-wishing " ; as a man might wish
a wife-beater to be himself beaten, or a
venal politician to be pelted with things
not hurtful but ignominious. It may not
be admitted so easily, though I think that
it should be finally admitted, that there is
a certain, steady, abiding, mutual hate, the
obverse of friendship. Thus few men on
this side of the North Sea will deny that
if the present mood of Germany were to
last, and achieve further frightfulness like
Louvain and the Lusitania, we might hate
this mood, and be hated by it, with interrup-
tion of common life, until the mood was past.
Hereupon, having dared to express ulti-
mate emotions, we must be wise and pay
tithes to caution.

108 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

As hate is a final energy of the soul, the
practice of hate is a Fine Art. I know
that love can sing ; and provided that hate
is in its right mind, I know that hate can
sing. We can thus have a Hymn of Hate ;
such a hymn as was one day sung by a
Master- Lover in one of his master-songs,
" Woe to you, woe to you !" This memor-
able Hymn of Hate is fine scorn of the
scorners. Yet is it sweet and lovable, for
it is the cry of Him who loved to the crest
of Golgotha.

But in these latter days we have heard
of another Hymn of Hate, made under
stress of foiled ambition. It is the dog-
gerel of hate — the frightfulness of men
who have shorn grief of all but its
grimace.

But having spoken of Golgotha and
having heard the love-begotten Hymn of
Hate from the Master - Lover, I hasten
from the doggerel of hate lest I yield to
kindred doggerel through kindred hate.

HERR PROFESSOR

HERR PROFESSOR*

Two quotations will throw light on the
present crisis : the first from a French
writer, Georges Bourdon, and the other
from a Belgian writer, Hamelius.

M. Georges Bourdon's book, " The Ger-
man Enigma," was written a year ago, to
bring about a better understanding between
France and Germany. For the purposes

* Towards the beginning of the war, and after
the first atrocities in Belgium, a prominent Austrian
Catholic man of letters, long resident in this country,
consoled a friend, saying : " You will see that the
first to protest against these horrors will be the
German professors." Not long afterwards ninety-
three German professors addressed a famous circular
to the world explaining the righteousness and
mercifulness of the German policy. Since then the
Austrian man of letters has been less prodigal of
prophecy.

Ill

115* EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

of his book M. Bourdon went to Germany.
He saw its cities. He interviewed its
citizens. He was deeply impressed by the
prevailing conviction that Germany must
take a foremost place in world -politics. But
one fact particularly struck him ; to wit,
that the most uncompromising champions
of the German idea were professors.

He says : " The Herr Professor is the
Sheik-ul-Islam of Germany, the keeper and
regulator of the German conscience. He
carries more sway over the convictions of
the German people — who are not less sub-
missive to intellectual than to official
authority — than any one else."

This is a fine point of wisdom seen
and expressed by the peace-lover from
France.

A second point of wisdom was exploded
upon M. Hamelius, Professor of English
Literature at the University of Liege, by
the bombardment of his university town.
In his recent book on the siege of Liege

HERR PROFESSOR 113

he remarks that one professor of history
was quite sure, up to the eve of the German
ultimatum to Belgium, that Germany would
not make war whilst the Kaiser lived, and
if it did make war it would respect Bel-
gium's neutrality ! Whereupon the Pro-
fessor of English Literature, during the
thunder of the German howitzers, discovered
that although he has known many uni-
versity professors, he has never found that
their judgment about practical matters was
more likely to be right than the judgments
of the men in the streets.

These two points of wisdom are of the
essence of the war ; for it is a war not
of missiles but of ideas — a soul-withering
Battle of the Books.

German thought, now running amok in
Western civilization, is a university pro-
duct. A casual glance at the maker of
modern German thought will be enough to
prove the point. Kant was a professor at
the University of Konigsberg. He began

114 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

by lecturing on mathematics, physics, logic,
metaphysics, morals, and philosophical ency-
clopaedia ; and ended by being ordinary
professor of logic and metaphysics. For
some time he was sub-librarian to the
Royal Castle.

Fichte was ordinary professor at Jena,
afterwards at the Prussian University of
Erlangen ; and received a professor's chair
in the newly founded university of Berlin,
which he kept until his death. It has
been said of him that he was constantly
modifying his system till he died !

Schelling was a professor at Jena,
Erlangen, Munich, and Berlin.

Hegel was professor at Jena, Nuremberg,
Heidelberg (where he wrote a defence of
the Government), and (I was almost going
to add, of course) Berlin. I take a sentence
from the biographical notice by W. Wallace
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica : " More
than a professor Hegel never became ; but
his influence over his pupils, and his

HERR PROFESSOR 115

solidarity with the Prussian Government,
gave him a position such as few professors
have held." This is delicious ! Again, in
1830, our Reform Bill prompted him to give
Berlin his views on the state of the British
Empire. He was too great a man not to
say some true things. But the professor
would out. His biographer adds : " Hegel
throws grave doubt on the legislative
capacity of the English Parliament as com-
pared with the power of renovation and
reform manifested in the more advanced
states of western Europe." This is equally
delicious. We can easily see through his
humility.

Scheiermacher was court-chaplain at
Stolpe, then, naturally, Professor Extra-
ordinarius of Theology and Philosophy at
Halle. I need hardly add that on the
founding of Berlin University he became
Professor Ordinarius of Theology in that
Seat of Wisdom.

Schopenhauer never became a professor

116 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

at Berlin. This accounts for some aspects
of his philosophy. An unbiased critic,
Ueberveg, says: "His later writings are
noted for their piquant utterances against
the prevailing notions in theology and the
attempts of philosophers to justify the same.
Venting his spleen with primary reference
to the success of Hegel, his more fortunate
antagonist, and to Schelling's call to Berlin,
Schopenhauer insinuates that these philos-
ophers were paid by the Government."

It is time that the thinkers of this country
began to realize that the greater part of the
modern German thinkers have been in the
pay of the Government. Berlin University
has been a Government Office as effectively
as the War Office. State-appointed profes-
sors are in the employment of the Prussian
Government Publicity Department.

There was a time when thought, or
philosophy, was supposed to have but one
sanctuary in Europe ; it had fled from
Paris, Oxford, Louvain, Salamanca, and

HERR PROFESSOR 117

even Rome, to the city on the Spree. The
Prussian Publicity Department, especially
that active branch called the University
of Berlin, succeeded in persuading many of
the professors in our native universities that
thought had now become a monopoly of
the fellow-citizens of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel. A Berlin text-book was almost
an oracle. To quote M. Bourdon, in trans-
ferring the quotation from Germany to
England, we had " become no less submis-
sive to German intellectual than to official
authority." Three centuries ago a good
deal of our religious thinking had been
brought ready-made from Germany, and
the nineteenth century saw the inhabitants
of these islands yielding the same historic
worship to this nation with its self-asserted
genius for religion.

M. Hamelius and our own common sense
are agreed in the vital principle that in
practical matters the opinions of Herr
Professor are no more likely to be right

118 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

than the opinions of the ploughman in the
furrow or the hawker in the street.

The moral of these thoughts is not far
to seek ; sought and found, it may mean
the intellectual emancipation of many of
the English-speaking people.

AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAIN

AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAIN

This morning 1 passed by train through one
of the richest, and therefore most smoke-
grimed, dismal landscapes of England. But
I did not see the landscape. I hardly knew
that I was in one of England's desecrated
natural beauties ; or even that 1 was in a
foul third-class smoking compartment, for I
was reading the raptures of a man in a prison.
Let me hasten to tell my readers that it was
not the " Ballad of Reading Gaol" I was read-
ing. It was a letter written by a Levantine
tent-maker to some friends of his on the Asia
Minor coast. The common title of the letter
is "St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians."
Having heard the title of this letter from a
Roman prison, my readers will agree that
the landscape would naturally become un-
obtrusive.

121

122 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Unless the tent-maker had made it quite
unnecessarily clear that he was a " prisoner
of the Lord " I defy any method of higher
criticism to find out from the tone of the
letter the dismal abode wherein it was written.
Every great work of art has an atmosphere.
But the atmosphere of this letter is not that
of a prison. I hope I shall be excused of
partisanship when I confess that it seems to
me to be written in the atmosphere of heaven.

It begins with thanks to God for all His
blessings (I suppose he includes the blessing
of the prison) and it ends with an invocation
of peace and charity. The rest is in propor-
tion to these altitudes.

It has been said by certain thinkers that
man is the victim of his environment, as in-
fallibly as bears are white through living on
the fields of snow. But the little tent-maker
seems to be not the victim, but the victor of
his environment. A prison is not usually
thought to be an emporium of joy. But this
prisoner in Rome begins the long chain of

AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAIN 123

prison-dwellers and catacomb-dwellers whose
joy is the sunshine of the world. I dare say
that the cell or room where Paul moved
about with fettered wrists and limbs was a
home of consolation. Men flocked to it in
their sorrows, sure of finding some word of
consolation from the unconquerable " am-
bassador in a chain." Even now the uncon-
querable mirth of the man is enshrined in
his letter, and men, like myself, on the verge
of despair at the ruins of a noble and beloved
country, Belgium, read the words of this
prisoner of the Lord and are delivered from
their gloom.

It is not the dismal and desperate environ-
ment of the man that dictates this letter ; it
is the man's unconquerable heart. " Cor
Pauli : Cor Christi." The heart of Paul is
the heart of Christ.

A hundred noble phrases, undreamt of in
the world's literature or philosophy, are
strewn throughout the letter. They make
a Litany of Heroism and Joy, even when set

124 EUROPE^S EWE-LAMB

down without their context : " To re-estab-
lish all things in Christ. The eyes of your
heart. The Church, which is His body, who
is filled all in all. God, who is rich in mercy.
Christ Jesus, who is our peace. The mani-
fold wisdom of God. The eternal purpose.
Rooted and founded in charity. The charity
of Christ. Walk in love, as Christ also hath
loved us, and hath delivered Himself for us.
Children of the Light."

Another splendid phrase is the following :
" Pray for me that speech may be given to
me, that I may open my mouth with con-
fidence to make known the mystery of the
Gospel, for which I am an ambassador in a
chain'' Paul, the rugged controversialist of
the Galatians, is now a new man with gentler
undertones in his speech. Yet the new Paul
is not weaker, but stronger than the old. A
Roman prison had served but to strengthen
this will of steel by reminding it of its own
weakness.

St. Paul still lives in his successors.

AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAIN 125

One of these has written a letter almost
worthy to be set beside the " Epistle to the
Ephesians." From the ruined city that was
onceMalines His Eminence Cardinal Mercier
has written an unforgettable letter to the
Belgian people.

I know of no canons of literature to judge
it by. Indeed, it belongs to a category not
of literature, but of life. Even though its
dishevelled paragraphs stir up every emotion
within the power of literature, the reader of
it will confess that no category of literature
is equal to its soul. It makes men weep
because a man wrote it weeping. It makes
men shudder because the man who wrote it
was still reeling under the sight of his bleed-
ing fatherland. It would almost make men
heroes, for the man who wrote it beckons by
all his words and deeds to that quiet heroism
which can bear and forbear until the day and
the hour appointed by " the eternal purpose."

This letter, which Junker stupidity has
scattered broadcast by its efforts at suppres-

126 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

sion, is called in ecclesiastical language " A
Pastoral Letter." The title reminds us of a
" Pastoral Symphony." It is the words of
a shepherd to his sheep ; almost too sacred
to be commented upon by those outside the
shepherd's flock. Throughout the letter this
good shepherd makes it felt that he loves his
flock so as to count it gain if he could lay
down his life for them. Everyone is wel-
comed to the broad bosom of his charity.
He speaks royal words of his king, he has a
martial tone when speaking of the men in the
trenches, his words weep with the stricken,
he does not forget the dead.

But if he is a shepherd addressing sacred
words to his sheep, his purpose is to make
his sheep resolute lions in face of the struggle
that lies before them.

Perhaps his greatest achievement is to
have told the truth, and to have told it within
sight of the German cannons. His noble
pastoral — or, if you will, proclamation — is as
courtly in its manner as an Oraison Funebre

AN AMBASSADOR IN A CHAIN 127

of Bossuet. Its writer never loses his self-
control or his manners, even when speaking
of the hordes that have laid waste his country.
But with an effect as paralysing as a can-
nonade of siege-guns, he insists upon the
truth — that truth which, if known in Ger-
many, might cost the Kaiser his crown before
the Allies reach Berlin.

One thing alone was needed to aim this
quiet call to patriotism and endurance with
an almost deadly momentum. That thing
was given it, as power is given to explosives
by restraint, when the German suppressed
the letter and imprisoned its writer. Its
writer may still be a prisoner. But his
words have the freedom of the civilized
world. And it may well be that the spirit
of this ambassador in a chain may inflict upon
German militarism the most decisive defeat
of the war.

A DILEMMA

A DILEMMA

German diplomacy seems, for the moment,
more capable of making trouble than of
making trouble less. It has of late blun-
dered on into such unhappy circumstances
that in sheer self-defence — or, as Herr
Professor would say, " in sheer self-expres-
sion " — it could keep from political suicide
only by ethical murder. There are certain
elements appealing to our pity in the plight
of a nation which can save its honour only
by taking its last shilling, buying a halter
and emulating Judas.

A cruel dilemma faced Germany when it
had sent its ultimatum to Belgium, and
Belgium had done what would have been
done by any simple-minded workman or
ploughman with a conscience.

131

132 EUROPE^ EWE-LAMB

Germany had pleaded, in the deep
gutturals of war, that the passage of Bel-
gium was necessary to Germany's national
safety. (In parenthesis we may say that
the attempted passage through Belgium
may mean Germany's national defeat.) But
having said that to attack France through
Belgium could alone ensure the safety of
the Fatherland, Germany could only let
loose the dogs of war in the Belgian corn-
fields and coalfields.

The dilemma was poignant. The passage
of Belgium was or was not vital to Ger-
many. If it was not, then German
diplomacy had lied ; or, what was politically
worse, had blundered. If the passage of
Belgium was vital to Germany, the scrap
of paper and the little nation that it pro-
fessed to safeguard had to be torn to
pieces. The frightfulnesses following these
torn pledges are not a new crime. They are
but the original sin sealed and countersealed
with the scarlet authentications of war !

A DILEMMA 133

And now another dilemma has burst
upon them : the " Pastoral Letter of His
Eminence Cardinal Mercier, Archbishop of
Malines, Primate of Belgium — Christmas,
1914."

Nothing that the war has begotten is of
the same rock-like texture. It recalls the
noble phrase written by another apostle
from a prison : " Stand, therefore, having
your loins girt about with the Truth ; and

having on the breastplate of Justice "

A sufficient defence. The shepherd's words
are but a quiet stratagem for blunting the
edge of the sword against the rock of Truth
and Justice.

It places Germany once again in a pitiable
dilemma, which may well baffle the finesse
of chancellors and, still more, the court-
martial bluntness of the men with the
guns.

What can Bethmann-Hollweg or Von
Kluck say to such doric truths as the
following? — "Belgium was thus bound in

134 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

honour to defend her own independence.
She kept her oath.

" The other Powers were bound to respect
and to protect her neutrality.

" Germany violated her oath ; England
kept hers.

" These are the facts.

" The laws of conscience are sovereign
laws."

It is as if Nathan said unto David :
" Thou art the man !"

Or, again, what can the men with the pen
or the men with the scientific-petrol-fire-
lighting-apparatus-for-house-destruction say
to this ? " Better than any other man, per-
haps, do I know what our unhappy country
has undergone. I have traversed the greater
part of my diocese. Entire villages have
disappeared. Thousands of Belgian citi-
zens have been deported to the prisons of
Germany.

" Hundreds of innocent men have been
shot.

A DILEMMA 135

" In my diocese alone I know that thir-
teen priests or religious were put to death.
. . . There were, to my own actual personal
knowledge, more than thirty in the dioceses
of Namur, Tournai, and Liege."

The dilemma of these words is almost a
more galling and immovable thing than the
trenches around Ypres.

For these "facts," quoted by the Car-
dinal, are either true or false. If false,
it is evident that Germany has every right
to place the Cardinal beyond present reach
of further complicating a delicate position.
The proper place for an Archbishop who
could write such falsehoods is — in prison.
But Germany has protested that Cardinal
Mercier is not in prison. The facts, then,
would seem to be true.

But if the facts are true, why has Ger-
many tried to suppress them as if they were
false ? And why does Germany still keep
possession of a little peaceful people whose
blood it has shed not only in open battles,

136 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

but by the methods of the burglar and the
incendiary ?

Once more German diplomacy has blun-
dered into a position where it must slay lest
it be slain. The dilemma is of its own
creation, yet is as imperative as its famous
ultimatum.

Cardinal Mercier in his Christmas letter
has made most grave statements that are
either true or false. If false, why do they
deny imprisoning him ? If true, why ?

But to quote the shepherd's own simple
words : " There is nothing to reply. The
reply remains the secret of God."

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL

The German war machine has broken
down twice in two distinct spheres. In the
battle-field it lost on the Marne, and lost
still more heavily on the Aisne. In the
sphere of diplomacy its Marne was the Pas-
toral Letter of Cardinal Mercier ; its Aisne
is the Cardinal's second letter on the payment
of the Belgian clergy. It is felt by some
acute war critics that in both the above
spheres the latter defeat is the greater. The
swoop on Calais ended in a deadlier failure
than the swoop on Paris. The Pastoral
Letter was but a range-finding for the final
artillery of the Cardinal's latest stand.

The opening words of the Cardinal's letter
are the best introduction to a view of the
question : " M. Governor- General, — A com-

139

140 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

munication of your Civil Administration in-
forms us that the German Government offers
to give effect — in the occupied portion of the
country — to the payment of the emoluments
of the clergy, beginning with the 1st of Sep-
tember or the 1st October, 1914 ; on condition
that the members of the clergy sign a declara-
tion binding themselves to undertake nothing
and to combat everything which can be pre-
judicial to the German Administration."

In spite of the quiet legal precision of these
opening words and of the rest of the letter,
the situation dealt with teems with dramatic
contrasts.

It is the eternal question of the politician
and the priest. The solution of that question
is no nearer than ever it was. Not that the
greatest difficulties arise from either politics
or the priesthood. In all the complications
of this eternal situation the greatest difficul-
ties arise not from politics or the priest-
hood, but from politicians and priests. There
are faults on both sides, just as there is

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL 141

human nature on both sides ; and perhaps
an equal proportion of faults, as of human
nature, in the opposite camps.

In this eternal wrangle between the poli-
ticians and the priests Kaiserism has for some
time played a very old and successful game.
It has made the clerics into State officials.
Kaiser Wilhelm II. is reported to have said
to the newly appointed Cardinal Archbishop

of X , " Now that you are Archbishop

you know your duty to the State." He did
not add, for it was unnecessary to add,
" L'Etat — c'est moi." Kaiserism has not in-
deed asked the clerics to wear the dress and
accoutrements of the Imperial Army ; but it
has seen that they are as perfectly regimented
and as pliable as the Army. Except in some
matters glaringly opposed to the Decalogue,
this ecclesiastical army — both leaders and
led — has to take its orders from the Kaiser,
whom it largely helps to keep on the throne.
Whilst university professors are occupied in
proving that the Christianity of Christ is the

142 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

discredited offspring of a priesthood, and that
the priesthood itself is a belated totemism,
the politicians are keeping the priesthood in
their pay as valuable civil servants. In other
words, we have the interesting sight of pro-
fessors writing books to show that clerics
should not be trusted because they are use-
less, and at the same time politicians are pay-
ing the clerics a salary, albeit a sweated
salary, and declaring them useful because, by
the great masses of the people, they are
trusted.

Germany carried this spirit with fire and
sword into Belgium. Once there, it began
a systematic and sectional massacre of Bel-
gian priests "pour encourager les autres."
It remembered the proverb of Jewry, " The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom."
What matter if in the light of burning Bel-
gium the proverb now reads, " The fear of
the Kaiser is the beginning of Kultur " ?

After this fear had been driven home, as it
thought, sufficiently by the slaughter of the

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL 143

priests of Belgium, Kaiserism felt that, if it
was to possess in peace its stolen property,
it must have the goodwill of the priests, who,
in Belgium more than in most nations, have
the goodwill of the people. From the millions
of gold pieces it has wrung from the poor
Belgian tillers and traders it magnanimously
determined to give back a few thousands to
the trusted friends of the people — on con-
ditions.

The conditions were so brutally obvious
that the offered salary was clearly an offered
bribe. The Belgian clergy — that is, the body
of resolute men led by Cardinal Mercier —
were offered a salary, indeed arrears of salary
from October, and even, mirabile dictu ! from
September, on one condition — that they
"would sign a declaration binding themselves
to undertake nothing and to combat every-
thing which would be prejudicial to the
German Administration."

The cynical callousness and diplomatic
stupidity of this insult to the innocent would

144 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

have been unbelievable — before the sack and
burning of Louvain. What could be more
stupid than to think that men who could not
be cowed by slaughter could be won by
bribery ? It was as if Kaiserism had offered
gold to General Leman for the forts of
Liege !

" Sign a declaration." A scrap of paper !
Kaiserism still hankers after the scrap of
paper. One recalls the little white hand of
Lady Macbeth. Kaiserism has long since
refused to admit that a scrap of paper signed
with its own name is of any binding force
over itself. But it insists that every such
scrap of paper shall have binding force over
all the others whose names appear beside its
own. It has just enough intelligence to
know that there are still some people with a
conscience ; and has not enough conscience
to recognize that if there is one nation that
should await a century before demanding a
scrap of paper from anyone, it is the great
braggart nation that hacked its way into

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL 145

Belgium through torn treaties and dis-
honoured signatures.

" Sign a declaration." Kaiserism knows
well that the priesthood of Belgium, typified
by Mercier of M alines, are so high-minded
as to sign nothing that they do not mean to
keep. Therefore they will not sign a declara-
tion to betray their country (for the price of
a halter), because they are not minded to
betray their country.

Had I been in the place of Cardinal Mer-
cier, and had 1 been in the same mind that
I am now, I might have been tempted to
answer this brutal insult, this crowning
frightfulness, in terms like these: " M. Gover-
nor-General,— We, the clergy of Belgium,
are very grateful to His Potent, Just, Mag-
nanimous and Invincible Kaiser for his high-
minded and magnificent offer to make good
our salary, not only from October, but even
from September. It is but another proof of
that unselfishness which true Kultur can pro-
duce in the most unlikely minds. It is but

10

146 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

another expression of that tenderness of
heart which has already showed itself towards
many of our fellow-priests, who died blessing
the coming of the Kaiser's invincible legions.
Not everyone can see that when your brave
soldiers shot our priests in scores it was
through a most merciful desire to spare these
men all the horrors that the ravages of the
Allies would mean to their Fatherland.

" You now offer to us, the leaders of the
people, a sum of money on condition that
we become paid servants of Germany in our
beloved Belgium.

" To those who do not know the subtle
German mind this offer of money to the
priests will be called a bribe, and men will be
heard, even in Belgium, to mutter the name
of 'Judas Iscariot.' But we, the priests of
Belgium, who have already experienced so
many proofs of German Kultur and kindness,
know the true inwardness of this offer of
money and this demand for a signed declara-
tion. We know what meaning our magna-

KAISERISM AND A CARDINAL 147

nimous hosts themselves would set upon this
demand, and what value they would give a
scrap of paper signed with their own name.
Words and names are but conventional signs.
They mean no more than the signatories
mean them to mean.

" We know that if the illustrious and in-
vincible Generals now in Belgium signed
this declaration they would mean to keep it
— that is, to keep it as long as it was con-
venient to be kept. They would cheerfully
put their name to a declaration obliging
them to support the Fatherland, and would
keep it until such time as they could work
for the overthrow of the Fatherland.

" When, therefore, you ask us, the priests
of Belgium, to sign a declaration to under-
take nothing, and to combat everything
which could be prejudicial to the German
Administration, we recognize that you ask
us to sign it after the manner of the Germans.
To this we willingly consent. We accept
your generous offer of gold ; and whenever

148 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

and wherever we can work for the overthrow
of the German occupation, unknown to you,
we will work till we die. And may God
reward you for your offer, as you deserve."

This is the letter I should have written
had I been in the Cardinals place, and had I
been in the same frame of mind as now.
But the Cardinal wrote another and wiser
letter — which the children of Belgium will
one day learn by heart in their schools when
they are taught what value to set on scraps
of paper bearing their name, and the lesson
is given under the old sacred formula : " Thou
shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God
in vain."

THE INSULT TO THE BELGIAN
CLERGY

THE INSULT TO THE BELGIAN
CLERGY

Not sufficient notice has been taken of
Cardinal Mercier's letter to the German
Governor-General in Belgium and to the
circumstances from which it sprang. It is
a pitiful tale of insult following upon mas-
sacre. It records a crowning act of fright-
fulness which makes us remember Luther
and his bloodthirsty advice about the
methods of treating the peasants in the
Peasants' War.

Yesterday I was talking with a young
" marechal de logis " in the Belgian Lancers
who was spending his few days' holiday
with his novice brother within our walls.
He has seen active service since the first
day of the war. He told me quietly that

151

152 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

on the afternoon of the day on which war
was declared, he saw a squad of German
cavalry near Namur. These men, he said,
had come into Belgium some days before
in civilian dress. Their orders were to
await the declaration of war, and then to
forgather, armed. It was part of Germany's
splendid treachery of preparedness.

With the same fine organizing instinct,
Germany prepared to deal with the priests
of Belgium. To quote the broken-hearted
words of Cardinal Mercier in his Pastoral,
" In my diocese alone thirteen priests or
religious were put to death. . . . To my
own actual personal knowledge more than
thirty in the dioceses of Namur, Tournai,
and Liege," To find a parallel with this
bloodthirstiness we have to go back to the
worst days of the French Revolution. But
the orgies of the Revolution, unlike these
organized orgies of the Kaiser's troops,
were not made still more loathsome by
the hypocrisy of expressed regret .

INSULT TO BELGIAN CLERGY 153

The frightfulness which shot priests in
scores was a carefully prepared military
expedient, which the Germans expected to
succeed. And it succeeded.

They meant to cow the Belgians who
remained in Belgium. And the poor Bel-
gians are cowed. A nation twice as brave
as Belgium, if that were possible, would be
cowed ; in other words, every other nation
would now be as Belgium now is, quiet and
still in the claws of a wild beast from whom
it has received almost deadly wounds.

The fright fulness meted out to all sec-
tions of the Belgian people, even to the
ministers of religion, was a deliberate policy
intended to keep the people quiet and the
lines of communication, perhaps of retreat,
unhampered. The militarists, who wanted
every German fighting unit at the front,
had no intention of employing these units
behind the trenches in the thankless task
of policing a galled and angry people. Ger-
many's battles needed every fighting man.

154 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

It did not escape the thought of the
intelligence behind this invasion of Belgium
that if Belgian priests could be persuaded to
calm their flock, the army of mere occupa-
tion could be still further lessened and the
trenches still more filled. In the past
counsels of Germany two forces have been
looked upon as of primary importance, fear
and love — to wit, fear of death and love of
money. German gold has been a most
efficient ambassador in unsuspected places.
Its bloodless victories will one day make
strange reading.

For the honour of mankind it is good to
know that at least once this ambassador
failed. Gold was offered to the decimated
priests of Belgium, when nothing except
food was more needed than gold. But it
was offered on conditions that make us
ashamed of human nature. Let us read
the words of Cardinal Mercier's reply to
the Governor- General : " A communication
of your Civil Administration informs us

INSULT TO BELGIAN CLERGY 155

that the German Government offers to give
effect — in the occupied portions of the
country — to the payment of the emolu-
ments of the clergy, beginning with the
1st September, or the 1st October, 1914,
on condition that the members of the clergy
sign a declaration binding themselves to
undertake nothing and to combat every-
thing which can be prejudicial to the
German administration."

It is almost inconceivable that Kultur
should have offered such a glaringly obvious
bribe and offered it with such calculated
niggardliness. This offer of the German
Government, with its feverish desire for a
" signed " scrap of paper, was an outflanking
movement against the loyalty of the Belgian
clergy. It was meant to make these reso-
lute children of the Belgian soil and Fathers
of the Belgian soul into paid emissaries of
the German Government.

The treachery of these Fathers in God
would have been worth at least one army

156 EUROPE^S EWE-LAMB

corps to the German fighting machine ; and
the German fighting machine is quite ob-
viously in want of all the army corps it
can find. But German diplomacy, which
has blundered badly in almost every avenue
of its communications, has seldom fallen so
low as when it offered a Judas bribe to that
section of the Belgian people which should
be the last to " run after gold." When the
Belgian Army, now so nobly fighting in
West Flanders, knew no defeat and were
set beyond the cast of bribery, how could
the army of priests tamely sell their country
for — the price of a halter? Had German
gold succeeded in outflanking the loyalty of
the Belgian clergy, I know not how a
Catholic priest could stand before the altar
of Belgium and exhort his flock to love of
their beloved fatherland. I could even
foresee that this cowardice of the clergy
would have loosened their hold over this
people whose faith has been a jewel in the
tiara of the Church. It would have been

INSULT TO BELGIAN CLERGY 157

the twice-dyed scarlet of treachery against
their fatherland on earth and their Father in
heaven.

There never was a moment's doubt that
the resolute army of Belgian priests, led by
the " Lion of Marines," would refuse the
Judas-price of treachery. But the noble
letter of the Cardinal refusing this German
bribe should be read, as I have read it, again
and again. It is amongst the classics of this
war's literature ; but unlike the Plutonian
classics of Bernhardi and his fellow fire-
eaters, it lives and moves, and speaks in a
"ccelum empyreum," a far-off kingdom of
the clouds where principles, not facts, are
of most worth, and God is very near, as
summer is now very near the fields of
Belgium, "yea, even at the doors."

ANOTHER WORD FOR BELGIUM

ANOTHER WORD FOR BELGIUM

So many of our own sons are in the fighting
trenches, so many of our heroes are maimed
or dead, so many great deeds are being
daily wrought by our own forces on land
and sea, that in the stream of self-praise or
self-pity we may perhaps overlook heroic
Belgium. Not that we should ever forget
it through wilfulness or neglect, but
through the mere powerlessness to cast our-
selves out beyond the intense emotions
mobilized in our own souls. For this
reason there will be nothing but thanks
for anyone who will do for Belgium what
Belgium will not do for itself, and recall
men for a moment from the sight of their
own deeds to the heroism of Europe's ewe-
lamb.

161 11

162 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Heroes are of two kinds— the resolute
and the steadfast. I know not which is
the greater ; and the heroes, who perhaps
know, will not decide.

The hero resolute is discovered on occa-
sion. With that suddenness, which is one
of the qualities of war, a great danger
threatens. The commonalty of men, and
even of fighting men, are struck motion-
less. They await the danger with a quiet
which is perhaps the shadow of lost hope.
If they see a desperate venture which might
save others at the cost of life, a thousand
wild thoughts hold their limbs rooted to
the earth. Give them a word of command,
and obedience will unlock their limbs. But
left to themselves they await death with
the quiet of despair.

It is at a moment like this that the hero
resolute comes into his own. The over-
whelming circumstances, which nothing in
his life could have led him to expect, seem
to be a matter of daily occurrence. He

ANOTHER WORD FOR BELGIUM 163

deals with them as if his life had been spent
in their midst. What genius is to the
man who fathoms truth when other men
are out of their depths in error, heroism is
to the man who takes a thousand risks and
faces almost inevitable death in the narrow
self-chosen path which he swiftly resolves
to follow. Sometimes he dies — but the
rest live. But mostly he lives ; for the
Master of life and death looks kindly on
the hero who by his bravery takes God the
Redeemer for his God.

The hero steadfast is of another fibre. It
is not a sudden onrush or plight that dis-
covers him. He does not live any intense
moment on a level high above the heads
and wills of his fellows. He does not sud-
denly summon from the still fastnesses of
his soul massed levies of power and daring.
He is not the gift of a supreme instant of
intuition and resolution.

On the contrary, he is the matured growth
of time. He is discovered, not in the open-

164 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

ing moments of a battle, when many men
have the inspiration to be brave, but in the
last hours of a wearying day of fight or
flight, when the hero resolute may perhaps
have sunk back exhausted into sleep. He
is not at his best in moving forward to
attack, but in failing to move backward
towards defeat. He is not gifted in the art
of undertaking or planning ; but what he
once takes up he has the art never to give
up, and what has been planned for him to
do he will die rather than desert. His
symbol is not the sword, with its swift thrill
of intense pain ; but the Cross, with its
lingering hours of agony.

I wish all my readers knew what our
forefathers meant by the forgotten word
" to thole." If they knew it in its untrans-
latable vigour they would say that " the
hero resolute dares, and the hero steadfast
tholes."

*****

I have said I do not know which hero

ANOTHER WORD FOR BELGIUM 165

is the greater. Only this I know, that the
man who has both modes of heroism is
twice a hero. And this my readers know,
and the whole world now knows with them,
that Belgium is that hero with a double
portion.

At nightfall, when Belgium could not
summon her full board of counsellors to
deliberate, she found a thrice-armed plun-
derer at her door, offering her the twelve
hours of night to choose between dishonour
and death. The deliberate choice of night
for this ultimatum was the first discharge
of that " frightfulness " which has given a
new word or a new meaning to the vocab-
ulary of war.

The little ewe-lamb was at once the
hero resolute. She met the miscreant with
almost a saucy daring, as a deep-sea yacht
might saucily dip its bowsprit into a storm-
angered billow. And she still rides the
storm.

Seven months have passed. The slow

166 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

tragedy of a martyred people has been
wrought, and is still being wrought, in
Europe's Haceldama. Every kind of
national suffering that could crush a people
has been vented on the saviours of civiliza-
tion. Belgium loved peace ; Belgium is in
the fiercest fire-zone of the war of wars.
Belgium loved to till the soil; the soil is
wasted, and the tillers cowed or fled.
Belgium loved the Arts, and her world-
famed monuments, now in ruins, have been
" cannon fodder." Belgium loved her own
people and thousands of her people are
fugitives in foreign lands. Belgium loved
freedom, having fought for it through two
thousand years ; and Belgium, after a few
years of a freedom that have enriched the
world, is once more the slave of a tyrant
whose yoke is not only thraldom, but insult.
Belgium loved God, and God's ministers
have been shot, and God's homes destroyed.
Every billow of the deeps of sorrow has
swept over this little people. But the land

ANOTHER WORD FOR BELGIUM 167

of sand dunes is not as the sand, but as the
rock. It still stands. It still fights. It
still tholes.

It is the hero steadfast.

King Albert is at once the saviour and
the symbol of Belgium. He has realized
the proverb of St. Vincent de Paul, a man
who knew : " Le bruit ne fait pas de bien ;
le bien ne fait pas de bruit." He has added
to his heroism the consummate touch of
reserve. His words are still to seek. Even
the destruction of his people has not un-
locked his lips ; it has merely unsheathed
his sword. " In silence and in hope " may
not be his motto ; but must have been his
model. Like his people, he has suddenly
dared without a cry ; and is now tholing
without a word.

The day will come when history will
have to give the King of the Belgians a
name. " Albert the Silent " would be such
a name ; true, yet not sufficient, as failing
to give the heroism that was the soul

168 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

behind his silence. 1 sometimes wonder if
we could find a fitter title than "Albert
the Undaunted."

Indeed, I shall hope one day to see some-
where in the halls of humanity a statue of
Albert with the words

ALBERTUS INVICTUS,

and near it a symbolic statue of Belgium,
with the words

BELGIUM INVICTUM.

ON FALSE PACIFISM

ON FALSE PACIFISM

Two errors, garbed as virtues, are at present
threatening the course of European justice.
One of these is false pity ; the other, false
pacifism. Now whereas we wish to speak
at length of the latter, a word may dismiss
the former.

False pity makes an appeal after this
manner : " Be merciful even to your enemy.
Overcome him if you will ; but be not over-
come by what is worst in him. Conquer, but
do not copy him. In the hour of victory for-
get your enemy's frightfulness. Forget even
that he is your enemy, and remember only
that he is your brother."

The errors latent in this appeal to the
quality of mercy need hardly be dwelt upon,
whilst one fatal quality swallows up the rest.

171

172 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

The truth is that this gentle-toned pity is
almost a superlative pride. It is so supremely
self-conscious that in spite of the soil of
Germany being still practically inviolate, it
calmly foretells victory.

The false pacifism, which we other pacifists
nowise confound with true pacifism, makes a
brave show on platforms and on paper. It
lends itself readily to the more moving kinds
of address. It appeals to the noble-hearted.
It unnerves heroes. It deceives even the
elect.

Seldom does it preach its evangel of peace
without direct mention of Him around whose
cradle angels sang of "Peace on earth to
men." It almost disarms criticism by be-
seeching Christian men to remember the
Rock whence they were hewn and the Cap-
tain whose victory on the mount was won :
Non occidendo sed moriendo, by dying, not
by putting to death.

But the noble blunder into which these
pacifists have fallen can be seen only by those

ON FALSE PACIFISM 173

who have the power of grasping, as the
Scholastics would say, certain simple dis-
tinctions.

Their first duty is to see the distinction be-
tween common virtue and heroic virtue. It
was the Greek thinkers and heroes who first
detected and proclaimed this simple distinc-
tion. Plato and Aristotle, who knew Greeks,
divided them into normal Greeks and hero
Greeks. The average man, whether Greek
or barbarian, can risk his life in order to save
his life ; in other words, he can be brave in
self-defence. Only a hero will risk his own
life to save another's ; that is, only a hero
can meet death bravely that others may
live.

This distinction between common virtue
and heroic virtue passes into the classical
Christian distinction between the command-
ments and the counsels. Until a man under-
stands these two, and the difference between
them, he has not understood Christianity ;
and until a man understands Christianity,

174 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

how can he judge of Europe in this year of
our Lord nineteen hundred and fifteen ?

This, then, is the distinction between
commandments and counsels. A command
is something that all must do. A counsel is
something that none need do, but some will
do. Thus unto everyone it is commanded :
" Thou shalt not steal." All are forbidden
to take what is not their own ; and are com-
manded to give back what is not their own
if they have taken it. But the Master has
given a counsel : " Sell all thou hast." This
is more than a command ; not, indeed, more
in obligation, but more in hardship and
nobility. It suggests that the higher way,
the way, not over the earth, but through the
air, is to those rare souls who have grasped
the principle that "a man's riches consists
less in the multitude of his possessions than
in the fewness of his wants."

Thus everyone is under the command :
" Thou shalt not kill." By virtue of this a
man may not take human life. Yet if

ON FALSE PACIFISM 175

another attempts his life he may defend
himself by slaying the other. The average
man, if attacked by another, could not be
bound to forgo all self-defence by force. Yet
if a man for some noble motive did allow
himself to be slain instead of slaying his foe,
he would be giving an example of heroic
virtue.

But too much stress cannot be laid upon
the sound ethical principle that " No one is
bound to heroic virtue." The attitude of
the Society of Friends towards war is un-
deniably a noble one ; or it would be noble
were it wise. But since it insists that every-
one shall exercise the heroic virtue of non-
resistance by force it lacks that touch of
mercy which would make it kindred to man-
kind.

A last and most necessary distinction is
between "meum" and "tuum" — that is,
between our power over our own rights and
our power over the rights of others. A man
may quite lawfully give his purse up to the

176 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

first stranger who asks it of him. But a
postman who would give up a purse he was
bound to deliver would be condemned for
neglect of duty.

In the same way an individual on the
banks of the Meuse might resign his rights
against trespass by allowing German troops
to pass through his garden. But if that
individual is a Belgian soldier, whose duty it
is to defend the rights of his fellow-country-
men, then to allow German soldiers to pass
through the garden would be a traitorous
neglect of duty. Far from being heroic
virtue, it would be the cowardice of treachery.

It is not a little strange that the men who
so persistently preach heroic virtue in the
matter of the commandment : " Thou shalt
not kill " do not preach it in the far easier
commandment : " Thou shalt not steal."

As we know, the commandment : " Thou
shalt not kill" is the chief safeguard in a
civilization that is dominantly military,
whereas the commandment : " Thou shalt

ON FALSE PACIFISM 177

not steal " is the chief safeguard in a civiliza-
tion that is dominantly commercial.

Now, the counsel to defend no rights —
even the rights of others, or our own trans-
cendent right to live — by an appeal to physi-
cal force is the absolute or heroic in the
commandment against killing. But the ab-
solute or heroic in the commandment against
stealing is : " Sell all thou hast and give to
the poor."

How few there are to urge this absolute
amongst the men who look on war as a
crime I Peace has its frightfulness no less
than war. Mammon is a more sanguinary
god than Mars. When men plead that
Mars is red-handed and should not be adored,
it may be well to remind them, amidst their
financial operations, that their counsels of
perfection would be more effective if they
themselves followed them in the lesser sphere
of self-emptied riches.

12

THE ETHICS OF WAR

THE ETHICS OF WAR

One of the surest tests of a sound or
unsound ethical system is its attitude to-
wards war. The chief reason of this may
be that ethics is a science of life ; and that
the main business of war is death.

What is difficult to decide in the abstract
question of war is still more difficult to
decide in the concrete when a nation has
to utter the word that invites the wilder-
ness.

It is not to be wondered at that some
thinkers of the gentler sort have looked on
war as such an evil as to be beyond the
power of good. They have been stunned
by the noise of war's artillery, by the
moans of the helpless wounded, by the
sobs of the bereaved, by the glare of

181 -

182 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

homes in flames, by the sight of children
of a common Father locked in a clutch of
hate.

In the horror begotten of such sights and
sounds they have denied that any good
could come of an evil so supreme. They
did not realize that their own spirit of
gentleness, far from ensuring the reign of
peace on earth, was too often the swiftest
way to war. They had not learned the
initial philosophy of life — that peace is not
a thing sought but a thing found, and that
the true way unto peace is through justice
and truth.

Almost equally deserving of our sympathy
are those who see in war a compelling ne-
cessity. Life's prizes and even life itself
is not to the weak. Every breath is a
victory. To stand is to overcome. " He
that shall overcome ... I will give him
power over the nations." There is, then,
much to be said for even the blood -and-iron
thunderings of Von Bernhardi, who has

THE ETHICS OF WAR 183

helped Germany to its Canossa by a book
on the " Right of War and the Duty of
War." Something akin to sympathy may
be aroused by such saying of his as " The
instinct of self-preservation leads inevitably
to war and the conquest of foreign soil. It
is not the possessor but the victor, who has
then the right. . . . Might is at once the
supreme right ; and the dispute as to what
is right is decided by war. War gives a
biologically just decision, since its decisions
rest on the very nature of things." Let me
hasten to add that though much may be
said in sympathy with the tone of mind
from which such thunderings spring, they
are the things we might expect from the
official defendant of a kleptomaniac charged
with robbery and violence.

The truth about war, like the truth about
any ethical matter, is a fine point ; yet not
a fixed mathematical point. It is part of
the great, intricate philosophy of evil. To
grasp this is to understand why the two

184 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

preceding theories have come into being.
Men think of war as they think of evil.
They either deny its existence or give it
a necessary existence. In the sphere of
morals there are not a few modern writers,
like George Bernard Shaw, who deny that
sin exists ; thereby widening sin's sphere of
action. Almost as many thinkers admit
sin not only as a possibility but as a neces-
sity. Both these false theories are not the
death but the growth of sin.

War, then, is an evil, as pain is an evil.
It is at its lowest a physical and social evil,
because it is the destruction of property and
even of life. It is at its worst the reign of
sin, because it is the denial of the law of
justice.

Men like the extreme Tolstoian pacificists
who deny that war should be are akin to
the Manicheans who maintained that evil
must be. To exaggerate a truth is to lessen
its truthfulness. The careless thinkers, like
Bernhardt, who have looked on war "as

THE ETHICS OF WAR 185

the greatest factor in the furtherance of
culture and power," are at heart Mani-
cheans. They make evil an absolute neces-
sity. They are at one with those who
admitted two first principles, an eternal
Principle of Good and an equally eternal
Principle of Evil.

The truth is that war is always a physical
evil and sometimes a moral evil. If it is
sometimes a conditional necessity it is never
an absolute necessity. Like every physical
or social evil it is not so evil that it cannot
be turned to good. A physical evil may
turn to our moral good. A social stain
may give occasion to heroic self-sacrifice.

All wars, then, are not good ; but some
wars may be good. There are wars just
and unjust ; and therefore wars good and
bad. It is admitted by ethical experts that
the question of war, like the question of
wage, needs to be accurately formulated.
In the course of seven centuries we have
done little to add to the laws laid down

186 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

by St. Thomas Aquinas for judging whether
a war is lawful : to wit, first, public
authority ; second, a just cause ; third, a
good intention.

The callousness with which this war on
Belgium was begun and has been carried
on, makes it plain that in the days to come
the nations, now cowed by the voice of the
great guns, must invite the voice of the
priest whose office it is to help the law of
the Lord God of justice.

St. Thomas, in denying clerics to the pro-
fession of arms, utters a word of supreme
wisdom : " Prelates should withstand not
only wolves who spiritually raven the flock,
but also robbers and tyrants, who do bodily
hurt ; not indeed by using material weapons
in their own person, but by spiritual wea-
pons, such as wise counsels, fervent prayers,
and the sentence of excommunication
against the headstrong."*

The modern world stands in need of new
* "Summa Pars III.," Qu. 40, Art. 2, ad fm.

THE ETHICS OF WAR 187

ethical legislation concerning two things :
(1) The just declaration of war. (2) The
just waging of war. For the moment the
whole matter of war is in the hands of
the politicians from whom the present
European crisis has arisen. It is tragic
that from the Hague Convention, the chief
effort made in modern times to formulate
a new Ethics of War, the Pope, the
supreme ethical teacher, was excluded !
The modern world will have to repent
that exclusion on a hundred blood- drenched
battle-fields.

Some of us, who have the dread duty of
ethical judgments, look upon the invasion
of Belgium as a crime so blatantly against
international justice, and therefore inter-
national peace, that England could have
kept neutrality only at the loss of honour.
It has seemed to us an occasion when the
nation not only could, but should, go to
war, lest justice should have perished from
the counsels of Europe. We own that men

188 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

on the other side of the Rhine are not of
this opinion. They disagree with us, and
indeed very decidedly, not on matters of
principle, but on matters of fact. It has
seemed to them, but not to us, that Belgium
meditated offering a free passage through
its territory to French soldiers on their
way to Berlin. Were this the case, the
invasion of Belgium would be not a crime,
but a blunder. But we think that this
was not the case, and therefore that the
destruction of Belgium will remain unto
all time not merely a military blunder, but
an ethical crime.

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE AND
WAR

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE
AND WAR

The son of a fighting family, like the
owners of Aquino, might be expected to
say direct and wise words about the duties
laid upon a nation by peace and war. If
St. Thomas has given very clear rules
about the ways of waging war it is because
his whole life was lived within earshot of
battle-fields. The thirteenth century was
pre-eminently a century of fighting. No
other century witnessed so many crusades.
Few centuries have seen the Popes more
often driven from Rome. The very year
of the saint's birth was marked by
Gregory IX.'s flight from Rome to Viterbo
and from Viterbo to Perugia. A year later
the Count of Aquino and the Abbot of
191

192 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Monte Cassino resisted the troops of
Gregory. In another five years Gregory
was again an exile from Rome. St. Thomas
was a boy of twelve years when he was
driven from his home at Monte Cassino
by the troops of the Emperor. When
Gregory IX. died, in 1241, the Papal
States were in the hands of Frederic II. ;
and the Emperor's troops were investing
Rome.

Innocent IV. had to leave Rome in
1244. He transferred his Court to Lyons,
where he spent the next six years in
exile from the Holy See. Urban IV.,
during the four years of his Pontificate,
never once set his foot in Rome, lest he
should fall into the hands of Rome's magis-
trates, who were officially his subjects, but
in reality were servants of his enemy the
Emperor, In 1250 the two brothers of
St. Thomas, moved, perhaps, by the
influence of their brother, deserted the
Emperor for the Pope. To punish them,

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE AND WAR 193

Conrad IV. stormed and took the castle-
home of St. Thomas, Rocca Sicca, destroyed
Aquino, sent Landulf, the elder brother,
into exile, where he died, and put the
younger brother, Raynal. to death by
starvation in prison.

It will be admitted that the saint's wis-
dom, though a gift from God, was largely
a divine gift through that very efficient
messenger of God, to wit, human experi-
ence. We have ventured to set down some
of this wisdom, which we stumbled across
in the fascinating pages of the " Summa."
More elaborate analyses of war can be
found elsewhere in the same great treasury
of wisdom. But it struck us, as it may
strike the readers of these words, that the
passage we are about to give has a sin-
gular grace of wisdom, which makes it a
lucid commentary on current events.

It was probably written at Bologna to-
wards the year 1270, when the writer's
powers and experience were at their ripest.

is

194 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

He was in a legal atmosphere. Bologna
was renowned for its professors of law.

The subjoined article is part of his won-
derful treatise on the Jewish laws, which
is itself part of an equally wonderful treatise
on laws in general. In answer to the ques-
tion whether the Jewish law made wise
regulations with regard to foreigners,
St. Thomas writes :

" Men may have dealings with foreigners
in two ways, to wit: (1) peaceful dealings ;
(2) warlike dealings. In both these ways
the Jewish law contained the most wise
regulations.

" 1. For it offered to the Jews three
methods of dealing peacefully with for-
eigners :

"(a) When foreigners merely passed
through their land, like wayfarers.

" (b) When they came to dwell in their
land as inhabitants. In both these cases the
law made merciful precepts. Exod. xxii. 21 :
* Thou shalt not molest a stranger nor afflict

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE AND WAR 195

him, for yourselves also were strangers in the
land of Egypt.' And again (Exod. xxiii. 9) :
' Thou shalt not molest a stranger.'

" (c) When foreigners wished to be ad-
mitted to full civic and religious rights.
But in this the law followed a definite rule.
For it did not at once receive them as
citizens ; just as it was the law with certain
Gentiles not to give citizenship to anyone
unless his grandfather or great-grandfather
had been an inhabitant. The reason was
that if foreigners recently arrived were
admitted to decide public matters, many
dangers might arise ; since foreigners, not
having a rooted love of the land, might
attempt something against its people.

u Hence the law that those nations only
should be admitted to citizenship who had
some kinship with the Jews, namely, the
Egyptians, amongst whom they were born
and reared, and the Idumeans, the sons of
Esau, the brother of Jacob. These were
admitted after the third generation.

196 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

" But others, who had warred upon them
as the Ammonites and Moabites, were never
admitted to citizenship.

" Lastly, the Amalecites, who were their
deadliest foes and had no intercourse with
them, were taken to be everlasting foes ; as
is said, Exod. xvii. 16 : ' The war of the
Lord shall be against Amalec from genera-
tion to generation.'

" 2. Moreover, the law laid down wise
regulations regarding warlike relations with
foreigners.

" (a) It commanded that war should be
declared justly; thus it commanded that
when they drew near to take a city they
should first offer it peace. Deut. xx. 10:
1 If at any time thou come to fight against
a city, thou shalt first offer it peace.'

"(b) It commanded that the war, once
begun, should be carried through vigor-
ously, trusting to God. Hence, in order
to keep this better, it commanded that
when the battle was about to begin, the

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE AND WAR 197

priest should encourage them, with the
promise of God's help.

" (c) It commanded that all hindrances
to the war should be cast aside, by sending
back to their homes those who could be a
hindrance.

" (d) It commanded that victory should
be used with moderation, by sparing the
women and children, and not destroying the
fruit-trees of the country."

The simple division into relations of
peace and relations of war is, of course,
obvious and classical.

Any thoughtful reader will be struck by
the writer's acute analysis of three peace
relations that can be attributed to foreign-
ers : (1) Mere wayfarers, or travellers;
(2) inhabitants ; (3) partially or wholly
naturalized citizens.

It has not escaped the accurate and
observant mind of St. Thomas that hasty
naturalization may be a danger to the
commonweal. We can imagine what he

198 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

would have to say to the hasty naturaliza-
tions that take place — after the declaration
of war. The simple, masterly words of the
article are a most illuminating commentary
on the events taking place now under our
eyes.

The saint does not take up a Manichean
attitude towards war, as if it were always
and essentially an evil. Certainly it is
always a physical evil. But it may be a
moral duty, and therefore a moral good.
The one important fact to be ascertained
before a war is its justice. In other words,
statesmen have to determine whether in
going to war they are infringing the rights
of others. Wars are not evil ; but unjust
wars are evil.

The son of Landulf of Rocca Sicca char-
acteristically remarks that once the war has
begun justly it should be waged vigorously
(fortiter). The people should take time in
making up their mind to war, but should
take little time in making war itself. They

ST. THOMAS ON PEACE AND WAR 199

should be as strong in action as they were
wise in council. Towards this strength of
purpose in waging a just war the priests
should help ; and help in their own espe-
cial way by promising the help of God.
St. Thomas was a man of peace. But it
is clear that his pacificism was not an
academic indifference which would allow
rights to be scouted, justice trampled on,
or treaties torn.

Again, his eagle eye recognizes that an
army, like a chain, is only as strong as its
weakest link. Not every addition to an
army is an addition of strength. The unfit
are best at home.

His last thought is about the quality of
victory. He would have wisdom and justice
in determining the war, strength and effi-
ciency in waging the war, mercy and
restraint in reaping the prize of victory.
Women and children, like all the weak
ones of a nation, deserve gentle treatment.

Again, in sparing, not. indeed the grain,

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but the trees, St. Thomas would have the
victors remember that too much severity
overleaps itself. To impoverish the defeated
unduly is almost to defeat the victors them-
selves, by robbing the defeated of the power
to make good to the victors the losses
of war.

In all these wise thoughts the Angel of
the Schools shows himself the accurate
thinker whose wisdom made him the coun-
sellor of Popes and Kings.

THE APPEAL TO PRAYER

THE APPEAL TO PRAYER

In certain final crises of national life the
nation has but two appeals : the appeal to
the Sword, and the appeal to Prayer. A
few days ago our own beloved country was
intent on both. In the floods round Ypres
and on the angered waters of the North Sea
a nation's fighting men were doggedly ap-
pealing to the Sword. At home in ten
thousands of homes of God the vast millions
of a nation were as doggedly making an
appeal to Prayer.

The appeal to the Sword is the later of the
two appeals ; or only earlier if there ever
was an age when primal man was not yet a
reasoning animal. But from the moment
that the earth welcomed a being who could
reason, there was at least one living thing

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whose first line of defence was something
nobler than physical force.

It must be remembered even in these
hours of supreme stress that war is essen-
tially an appeal to physical force. Now
when intelligence uses a physical medium
for self-expression, the lesser is not adequate
to the greater and there is a selvage of un-
expressed thought which demands explana-
tion. In the same way, when intelligence
uses physical force to defend itself, and es-
pecially in self-defence against intelligence,
some apology is needed. Wars cannot enter
a world at peace without self-excuse. Even
wars of self-defence must be defended. The
sword when used by intelligence against in-
telligence must be an unhappy last resort ;
not an honoured, necessary Court of Last
Appeal. The desperate remedy of war
must be sought only when all better means
have failed. Men threatened with the
sword fly to the sword only when the worst
comes to the worst ; and not as to some

THE APPEAL TO PRAYER 205

noble altitude of judgment whose decision
is divine.

1. Let us emphasize the fact that no
matter how much science is pressed into the
service of war, the appeal to the sword is not
a scientific appeal to intelligence but a des-
perate confession that, in the affairs of men,
intelligence is bankrupt. It takes no little
humility to confess, or even to see, this
truth ; especially in an age that has been
taught by its historians to despise the
mediaeval " Ordeals by Fire and Water."
We have had many a lesson on the
ignorant, unscientific superstition of the
men (who built Durham and Rheims ! and)
who sought the final verdict of truth and
justice from fire and water ; as if these were
not blind forces of nature, but intelligent
judges of what is true and right.

But in the matter of superstition, if the
first stone must be cast by the century that
is without sin, then the twentieth century,
with its world-wide war, must withhold its

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hand. It must remember, or be reminded,
that war is an appeal to the same blind
forces, and with a still blinder trust. If
truth and justice are thought to emerge by
the verdict of victory, the appeal to war
means the blasphemy that truth and justice
follow the flag of sound finance, scientific
organization and super-armies. This is not
a new thing in the kingdoms of the earth.
It has been unmasked by those consum-
mate military critics, the Hebrew major
prophets. It has even been named by them
"making God serve."

The appeal to the elements was a naive
acknowledgment that the Creator was
supreme over the work of His hands ; but
the appeal to War is a tacit assumption that,
at least in the realm of international justice,
man by his armies imposes his will on his
Creator. There are men, like Von Bern-
hardi, who state this blasphemy, this super-
stition in modern polysyllables by saying that
" War gives a biologically just decision; since
its decisions rest on the nature of things."

THE APPEAL TO PRAYER 207

2. Careless, or, if you will, thoughtless,
thinkers are sometimes led to look on war
as an appeal to intelligence by seeing the
stupendous intellectual energy that prepares
and carries out a war. No one will deny
that the present war is a synthesis of every
modern triumph of human intelligence over
physical force. Yet, in point of fact, the
war is a triumph of physical force over
human intelligence.

This will appear a paradox until men learn
to judge of human actions not by their force
but by their motive force. The limbs of a
lion and the fangs of a tiger are works of
great intelligence. But they are set in
motion by the heart of a lion and by the
heart of a tiger. When a nation forgathers
its fighting-men and all its scientific energy
to trample on the rights of others, the en-
suing bloodshed is not a work of intelligence ;
or it is only a work of intelligence compelled
and degraded by brute force.

From this we may learn to see that the

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"verdict" of ruined Belgium is not "biologi-
cally just"; but psychologically criminal.
It does not illustrate the law of the " Sur-
vival of the Fittest." The only law it illus-
trates, for the time being, is the " Survival
of the Strongest." Now so far is this latter
law from the former that if a bullet happened
to have passed through the brain of Shake-
speare, the latter biological law would ap-
prove the survival, not of the brain but of
the bullet !

3. Because it is clear that war is a last
woeful expedient, which demands apology,
it must not be thought that war when neces-
sary is ignoble. To take the sword against
the sword may be an individual's, as it may
be a nation's, clearest duty and noblest self-
sacrifice. To face overwhelming odds as
David did in meeting Goliath, and Belgium
has done in withstanding Germany, is to
win an everlasting place in history.

Not every one that takes up the sword
appeals thereby to brute force and forgoes

THE APPEAL TO PRAYER 209

reason ; but only the one that in sheer im-
patience for self-assertion appeals away from
the forms of reason and law to the chaos of
aggression. Nations that thus appeal to the
sword shall die by the sword.

Yet truth and justice are in a woeful
plight when they can no longer be defended
by their natural guardians — to wit, reason,
conscience, law ; but by the brute arguments
of pain, fear and blood.

Prayer is for every nation threatened with
slavery the Court of First and Last (that
is, Highest) Appeal. If we have called the
sword a Final Appeal it is only in the sense
that a nation in extremis may find no other
defence against physical force but physical
force — a sword against a sword. The Truth
once asked the servants of the law why they
had come out against Him with swords and
staves. They had no answer, but the swords
and staves.

To ask the sword to give a biologically
accurate or ethically just verdict is as fatuous

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as to invite a lion from Africa to sit with
wisdom upon the woolsack at Westminster.
On the other hand, when our warfare is not
with mere brute force but with intelligence,
there is nothing more natural than to appeal
to Intelligence ; and in the last place, to
appeal through Prayer to the First Intelli-
gence.

We have called the Appeal to Prayer the
scientific attitude ; and somewhat demeaned
it by the title. We are not concerned to
canonize prayer ; we would merely recom-
mend it to those word-wearied scientists
whom the dust of modern discoveries pre-
vents from seeing the one thing necessary.
To such as still look upon the sword of flesh
as more effectual and more scientific than
prayer, the sword of the spirit, may be com-
mended the words of a great scientist. Sir
William Ramsay, who thus addressed a
group of theological students : " Do not be
afraid of the Supernatural. . . . The more
we study, the better we study, the better we

THE'APPEAL TO PRAYER 211

see that there is one principle on which
everything else is based. It is the principle
that god is." If this view of the scientist
is true and scientific, then the appeal to
prayer, being a profession of the first scientific
principle, is but the soundset science carried
out to its most imperative conclusions.
Apology must always be offered for an
appeal to the sword. But no apology need
be offered for an appeal through prayer to
the Intelligence which controls both him that
prays to be defended and him from whom
he seeks defence.

Be it remembered indeed that prayer is
not a mere auxiliary of the sword. Men do
not, or should not, first unsheathe the sword,
and then ask God not to send it back un-
satisfied to the scabbard. This would be to
offer sacrifice to some bloodthirsty God of
Battles. But of the millions who lately sent
prayers heavenward in intense desire, few
prayed to any other God than the God of
Truth and Justice. On the lips of all were

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found the words " Thy Will be done," not
"My Will be done."

What more could men do to bring in the
triumph of Justice? What more could a
nation do to show that it did not seek
revenge ?

What more could the offender do than
thereby to bare his shoulders meekly, if
timidly, for the blows of Him who strikes
only in love, and who chastises only for
amendment ? What more could men at
war with one another do to hasten the day
of reconciliation when the old errors have
passed and the old enmities have grown
into a brotherhood of men held together by
love of a Common Father ?

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

It is a common happening and a common
mistake, to state problems in terms of what
is of least importance in them. Thus
miracles are usually stated in terms of
stones, water, bread, wine, rain, wind,
gravity, barometric pressure, meteorology,
when they are essentially problems in matter
and spirit, and especially of that supreme
Spirit to whom matter and all other spirits
owe their being and their abiding.

Or, again, in spheres that are not miracu-
lous we make the same misstatements, and
thereby leap into the same mistakes. We
can state a death by gunshot merely in
terms of: (1) A bullet, that is, an ounce of
lead ; and (2) an organic body of flesh and
blood. In this statement of the problem

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the resultant death is a natural mystery in
the sphere of thought, and a miracle in
the sphere of action, for it seems to be
an effect with no, or no sufficient, ante-
cedents.

But if we go a little further back, and
state the death-by-bullet problem in terms
of a high explosive propelling the bullet at
a high velocity, the mysteriousness of the
result is at an end. The effect is seen to be
a phenomenon, with sufficient antecedent.
The law of causality is justified.

What we have suggested in these two
examples may be realized still more in what
is so commonly called "The Problem of
Suffering," or, again, "The Mystery of
Suffering."

This problem is always with us ; but it is
not always making the same appeal to us,
nor are we always equally sensitive to its
appeal. It is not impossible that with the
world as it now is, war is no greater evil
than peace. Indeed, it has often been urged

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 217

that the thing we call peace is that con-
summate evil, an underground, hidden, and
persistent war, accompanied by a death-roll
far beyond Waterloo or Neuve Chapelle.

The possibility of this may be made
clearer by remembering that men are often
less conscious of sound or even of noise than
of any change in the intensity of sound.
Indeed, when sleeping ears are accustomed
to the great noises of a storm, a battle, or a
city, nothing awakes the sleeper quicker
than a sudden silence. Or, again, men
sleeping in the sunshine are awakened by
the swift passage of a shadow across their
eyes.

At the present time war, with its unusual
appeal to our sensitiveness, is stimulating
frightened souls into questions, answers, and
statements that have little else in them but
the seeds of a rank despair. These poor
panic-philosophers count every gash and
pain that men and women and little children
are now enduring. They think of the

218 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

hospital wards, now full of bleeding and
mangled bodies. The pictures served up to
them by the daily press draw no veils over
the horrors of a battle-field. Realism has
come to its own so dramatically by the help
of the camera, that we might now recognize
our own mangled father or brother in an
Eye-witness photo-picture of Ypres or Neuve
Chapelle.

Then, again, the mental and moral suffer-
ings of the sufferers are painted to us day by
day through the genius not merely of press
correspondents, but of masters of fictional
literature. When men like Philip Gibbs
and R. S. Hichens are using their genius to
describe the horrors of mind and soul that
war brings with it as its inseparable shadow,
no wonder that the resultant gloom is able
" to deceive, if that were possible, even the
just."

It is on the battle-fields of the soul as
on the battle-fields of Flanders. There are
times when the smoke of battle is so deep

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 219

and dark as to hide the sun. Men and
women cry out in despair, "Who will solve
this problem of suffering ?" or, " Why is
such suffering allowed to come upon men ?"

Now, 1 would ask such grief -stricken
souls to bear with me when I say that the
"mystery is made deeper by a name." It
is a problem only when it is a problem
of suffering.

We should discuss this problem of suffer-
ing not in terms of suffering, but in terms
of sin. In other words, the pain that men
bear should be discussed in terms of the evil
that men do.

This is the great way of the Hebrew
prophets, whose prophecies or sermons are
little else than efforts to teach the Hebrew
people the true philosophy of their national
humiliations and defeats. Men like Isaias
and Jeremias were not hermits in a narrow
cell, into which nothing of the world entered
but a faint re-echo. They were the philan-
thropists and social workers of their day.

220 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

They stood in market-places on the eve of
invasion, and denounced the selfishness and
sin that had brought the enemy to the gates.
They were nothing if not national, yet
their nationality consisted in thinking their
beloved country too great to be honoured
by anything but the truth. Hence every
national problem, such as national defeat
and national exile, is discussed by them in
terms of sin. They tell Judah that the evil
which awaits it or has befallen it is the fruit
of its own hands. They forestall the word
of the Apostle, " The wages of sin is death."
All national sufferings are for them the
wages of sin.

Few writers of a " Philosophy of History "
have as much true philosophy to offer the
world in their largest book as Isaias offers
us in his opening chapter. He does not
withhold the truth, nor does he disguise it
under a smiling mask. In days of war the
preacher of truth must, like Isaias, state
what he sees as plainly as he sees it. It will

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 221

be granted that in the following words
Isaias honours his people by the truth —

" Woe to the sinful nation, a people laden
with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious
children.

" They have forsaken the Lord, they have
blasphemed the holy one of Israel, they
are gone away backwards.

" The whole head is sick, the whole heart
is sad.

"Your land is desolate, your cities are
burnt with fire: your country strangers
devour before your face.

" Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers
of Sodom.

"Give ear to the law of our God, ye
people of Gomorrah.

"To what purpose do you offer me the
multitude of your victims ?

"My soul hateth your new moons, and
your solemnities: they are troublesome to
me, I am weary of bearing them.

" Learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve

222 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the oppressed, judge the fatherless, defend
the widow.

" And then come.

" But if you will not, and will provoke
me to wrath : the sword shall devour you
because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken
it"(Isa. L).

Nothing could be clearer and more trum-
pet-like than the prophet's appeal to sin as
the cause of their woes. The man of God
knew that an hour of national defeat was
not an hour for flattery.

How far is his philosophy from that of
the historians of to-day, who discuss these
same sufferings of the Hebrew people ! To
them it is essentially a problem of politics.
The balance of power or some other political
principle is the sufficient reason for the low
estate of Judah. They discuss the problem
in terms of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia
— that is, they look on the surface of the
events, and not on the causes of the events,
or if on the causes, then only on such as lie

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 223

nearest the surface. They do not discuss
the tree in terms of the root.

But in all organisms the remote causes
are of greatest importance. Thus, in matters
of bodily health it is not what we have
recently eaten but what we habitually eat,
not our last night's sleep but our habit of
sleep, that determines our state of health or
unhealth. So, too, it is not the most recent
political or diplomatical crisis that is of most
consequence to a nation, it is the nation's
attitude of soul towards the ethical standard
of right and wrong.

If Plato has suggested that even a change
in the musical standard of a people is of
danger to the commonweal, how much more
danger is there in a change of the moral
standard ! Isaias plainly rebukes the people
of Judah for their breaches of the Deca-
logue. " They have forgotten the Lord "
(the First Commandment), "they have
blasphemed me" (the Second Command-
ment). Other commandments of the Deca-

224 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

logue have met a like treatment. So far
have they strayed from the word of the Lord
and the law of God, that they must " learn
to do well, to seek judgment, to relieve the
oppressed, to judge the fatherless, to defend
widows" — a very elementary social pro-
gramme. They have been occupied with
politics when they should have been occu-
pied with ethics. They have been seeking
to make no political blunders when they
should have been seeking to avoid sin. At
length sin has earned its wage, and the
sword has been unsheathed from its scabbard.

But even the sword itself can sin.
Ezechiel has given us the philosophy of sin-
ful conquest in a passage of unsurpassable
eloquence —

" Son of man, prophesy and say : Thus
saith the Lord God.

" The sword !

"The sword is sharpened and furbished.
It is sharpened to kill victims, it is furbished
that it may glitter.

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 225

" O sword ! O sword ! Come out of thy
scabbard to kill, be furbished to destroy
and to glitter.

" Whilst they see vain things in thy
regard and divine lies : to bring thee upon
the necks of the wicked that are wounded,
whose appointed day is come.

*****

" Return into thy sheath.

" I will judge thee in the place wherein
thou wast created.

" I will pour out upon thee my indignation.

" In the fire of my rage I will blow upon
thee, and will give thee into the hand of
men that are brutish and contrive thy
destruction.

" Thou shalt be fuel for the fire.

" Thy blood shall be in the midst of the
land.

" Thou shalt be forgotten.

"For I the Lord have spoken it"
(Ezech. xxi.).

To state the problem of suffering in terms,

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not of suffering, but of sin, is to state it in
terms of the free will. The whole problem
is lifted into a higher sphere by the entry of
free will. For a free will, which is also a
good will, that is, a free will which identifies
itself with God's Will as revealed in the
Ten Commandments, would put an end
to the greater part of the sufferings that
burden mankind. Such a good will would
be the end of wars.

Yet even when wars through the ill will
of men have brought suffering upon the
innocent, the good will has a divine power
of transmuting the dross of suffering into
the fine gold of God's love.

In the noble Pastoral Letter of Cardinal
Mercier to the Belgian people the Lion of
Malines proved himself to be of the long
line of prophets. Whilst urging his people
to even greater endurance on behalf of their
national independence, he was not content
merely to count the cost in terms of
thousands slain and the millions suffering.

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 227

Belgium's unique suffering was not a prob-
lem in suffering, but in sin ; that is, in free
will that had done wrong and could do right.

This former professor of philosophy at
Louvain teaches the highest philosophy to
Belgium in words like these : " It would
perhaps be cruel to dwell upon our guilt
now, when we are paying so well and so
nobly what we owe. But shall we not con-
fess that we have indeed something to
expiate ! We, too, priests, religious — we
should be the public expiators for the sins of
the world. But which was the thing domi-
nant in our lives — expiation, or our comfort
and well-being as citizens ? Affliction is in
the hands of Divine omnipotence a two-
edged sword. It wounds the rebellious, it
sanctifies him who is willing to endure."

The Cardinal proudly refuses to offer his
beloved people any other sympathy than
the truth. Suffering such as no nation has
seen for centuries is upon his fatherland.
Yet so firm is his trust in the spiritual

2£8 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

vision of his people that he refuses to discuss
it merely as a problem of suffering. To
him as to them it is a problem of sin, that is,
of a will that has either strayed from God
and brought suffering upon itself, or that
has been visited by a suffering which its
free choice can transmute into "a ray of
light, a pledge of love, a crown of life."

i

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS
HOPE

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS
HOPE

"At the present time the dogmatic religionists
would be better employed in considering the failure
of Christianity.

"The spectacle of the Christian peoples fighting
each other like savages, and each calling upon God
to help them, and believing that God is helping
them in their atrocities, would be ludicrous but for
the pain and misery and horrors entailed. We have
had two thousand years of Christianity, and the
result is so bad that perhaps humanity will begin
to see the futility of priest-ridden religion for pro-
gress and civilization.

" Let us consider humanity, and leave priest-craft
and church-craft alone.'1 — Extract from an English-
man}s letter to his Sister, September 9, 1914.

The Philosophy of History was founded in
426, when Augustine of Hippo wrote his
work " On the City of God." On August 24,

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410, Alaric and his Goths sacked Rome. It
was almost fifteen centuries to the day and
year before the Sack of Louvain.

Patriotic refugees from Rome rent the
heart of the Bishop convert from Manicheism
by laying the blame of Rome's ruin on the
Christians who had dethroned the old strong
gods of Paganism for the meek outcast of
Golgotha.

There was much to be said, and no doubt
much was said, on the side of this panic
philosophy. Rome had had nearly a thousand
years of uninterrupted conquest — they called
it civilization — under the old gods of Romu-
lus and Remus, of Cato Major and Caesar.
One by one the nations of the Orbis Terra-
ruin had yielded by war or threat of war to
the City of Rome. Then across the path of
Roman progress was thrown the blighting
shadow, as they called it, of the pale outcast
of Golgotha. Only one hundred years of
this outcast's religion had sufficed, since
Constantine, to ruin the world-wide Empire

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 233

and to fill the Forum with the looting, in-
cendiary hordes of Alaric.

These bitter arguments of fire and sword,
heightened by the reproaches of homeless
Romans, filled the gentle, philosophic soul
of Augustine with a tender yet adamant
apologetic.

Years before these apocalyptic horrors be-
fell him, he had written a noble, sombre
book of " Confessions." Therein he had dis-
owned without bitterness his old Manichean
theory of eternal, ineradicable evil. He had
pleaded with humble self-accusation that
God must be infinitely wise and good, seeing
that He had been able to draw good out of
such an evil thing as the heart of Augustine.

To such a heart it was therefore natural
to see the hand of a good God stretched
out over the smoking ruins of the Imperial
City. In such utter depths of sorrow he
felt that the soul's tears could be dried by
God alone. From the left hand of God's
justice he took refuge in the right hand of

234 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

God's love. He fled from God to God.
Nay, he fled even from despair to hope. He
had the prophetic daring to detect amidst
the smouldering embers of a dead civilization
the first timid shoots of a civilization nobler
still. The fall of the City of the World
found Augustine the man in tears ; but
through his tears Augustine the Christian
descried with joy the towers and walls of
the City of God.

By all this he was proving himself a true
Roman in his deep humanity. The human
mind, or, to be more accurate, the human
soul, has ever found in the existence of sor-
row, pain, sin, evil, an argument against the
existence of God. The fact of darkness has
been taken to disprove the sun ; yet nothing
demands the sun so much as darkness. This
argument of evil is delivered against the
soul with barbed poignancy when first the
burden of bodily pain or worldly loss is laid
upon man. Again, in periods of widespread
suffering, such as the present, certain sensi-

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 235

tive souls are found almost to lose sight of
God.

That this is no unworthy or inhuman doubt
in sensitive souls may perhaps be granted
when it is seen to have been urgent with the
greatest minds. Against the central truth
of God's existence the mind of Aquinas could
bring only two essential difficulties ; and one
of these is the existence of evil. No wonder,
then, that the upholders of Law, Order, and
the world-wide Pax Romana reeled under
the shock of Rome's fall, until caught up in
the arms of Augustine's " De Civitate Dei."
Even God seemed absent from His charge
until a man of God proved by pen and
crozier that the dark steeds of evil were
everywhere drawing the chariot of final
Good.

From St. Augustine of Hippo's book " On
the City of God," written to console some
terror-stricken Romans for the fall of Rome,
let us turn to this letter written by an

236 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

Englishman to his sister, amidst the horrors
of the world's greatest war. It is a character-
istic utterance of a soul unmoored by grief.
As a cry of grief we can offer it only a kin-
dred cry of sympathy. But as a stricture
upon God, our chief or sole solace in grief, it
claims not sympathy, but stricture. It is a
painful reminder that men, under exceeding
sorrow, often lay violent hands on the one
being who can bring them consolation, and
take to themselves useless things that add
sorrow unto sorrow. When a great earth-
quake overthrows a city, the streets are filled
with dazed townsfolk who have left food
and raiment behind, and have burdened
themselves with some article of furniture
hastily picked up, they know not why, in the
terror of the moment.

Let us set down some of the assumptions
that make the apparent strength of this
letter. The writer assumes :

1. That only those who believe in the dogma
of a personal God believe in dogma, (This

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 237

is the inward meaning of the phrase " dog-
matic religionists.")

But the writer does not recall that dog-
mas are of two sorts, positive and negative.
A positive dogma is, " There is a God." A
negative dogma is, " There is no God." Or,
again, a positive dogma is the foundation of
Christian faith. " The infinite, if He exists,
can be known." A negative dogma is the
foundation of modern Agnosticism. " The
infinite, even if it exists, cannot be known."

From this it will be seen that the agnostic
writer of the phrase " dogmatic religionist "
is no less dogmatic than the religionist.

2. That priests have created Christianity.
(This would seem to be suggested by the
two phrases " priest-ridden religion " and
" let us consider humanity, and leave priest-
craft and church-craft alone.")

Historically speaking, the priesthood of
the time of Jesus Christ did not beget
Christianity. On the contrary, they violently
resisted it.

238 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

The truth is that Jesus Christ founded
both Christianity and the priesthood. The
statement that the priesthood founded
Christianity is an assumption — too good to
be true.

3. Tliat, at any rate, Christianity has
caused the present state of things, and es-
pecially the present war, (This is an assump-
tion against the weight of facts.)

For at least three hundred years Christian-
ity in the person of its officers, the Christian
priesthood, has been banished from the
councils of Europe's war lords. The men
who are responsible for this war forgathered
at the Hague Conference to treat of peace.
It is almost inconceivable that they shut out
from their councils the Pope, the official
legate of the Prince of Peace. Much blood
will have to be spilled before that blunder
and crime has reaped its full harvest.

But if Europe is reaping in the blood-
drenched plains of Belgium what Europe
has sown, it is Europe of the politicians, not

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 239

Europe of the priests. If the man on his
way from Jerusalem to Jericho has been
robbed and beaten almost to death, it is not
the priest and the Levite who have robbed
and maimed him. It is the politicians and
such priests as have betrayed their sacred
calling under the lure of politics.

It is wonderful that this war is laid to the
blame of Christianity, which has been in the
world for about nineteen centuries, and is
not laid to the blame of the lack of Christi-
anity, which has been in the world for count-
less centuries.

There is just one achievement in the
sphere of war laid to the credit of Christianity
— namely, the truce of God. When priests
were listened to in the war councils of
Europe war was not the fierce unending
massacre that it has since become. It was
quite as decisive as are the long-drawn
struggles by the Aisne and Yser. But the
limitations of the struggle would be welcome
to the Europe that is now reeling under the

240 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

strokes of war. If priests were at present a
power and their truce of God still an inter-
national law, the soldiers in the plains of
Belgium and France would have three days
rest a week ; women and children, as well as
priests and nuns, would be sacred persons ;
the labourer would be safe in the fields, the
pilgrim on the highway. But alas ! the
priest is powerless, and millions of Europe's
manhood are shedding their blood in a war
that gives no promise of lessening the sove-
reignty and horrors of warfare.

4. That an institution has failed to be use-
ful because men have failed to use it.

Christianity is not an institution with
physically coercive power. Christianity pre-
supposes man's free will ; it is only of use if
men are willing to use it. Christianity does
not, cannot, compel free will to carry out its
teaching. If man refuses to obey, the punish-
ment that inevitably follows is but the in-
evitable failure of what is ill-equipped.

No one could say that it is the principles

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 241

of Christianity that have caused this war
of aggression. The invaders have set at
naught two elementary commands of Chris-
tianity : " thou shalt not steal ; thou shalt
not kill." Theft safeguarded by murder is
no part of the Christian ethic.

But as a war of defence, this struggle is
nobly stimulated and helped by Christianity.
Belgium's power of heroic resistance is
almost a religious quality. To choose the
way of death rather than the way of dis-
honour is supreme worship of the God of
Justice. Belgium's struggle is Belgium's
prayer.

5. That all prayer is blasphemous, because
some prayer is blasphemous. (This is the
gist of the phrase : " Each calling upon God
to help, and believing that God is helping
them in their atrocities.")

The perplexed writer of this biting phrase
might test the validity of his reasoning by
substituting the word "science" for the
word " God." It would then read : " Each

16

242 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

calling upon science to help them, and be-
lieving that science is helping them in their
atrocities."

The only difference between the two
forms of expression is that as a matter of
fact science is helping both sides, and both
sides are agreed on the fact ; but that God
is helping only the right side, and both are
equally agreed on this fact.

A soul has fallen upon absolute despair
when it can find only anger against the
sole source of hope. At the present
moment, when the men of Europe are
divided almost beyond the hope of recon-
ciliation, is it a little thing that they are
agreed, in part, about the thought of God ?
Would it be kind to Europe to snatch from
its harassed mind the one thought powerful
enough to reconcile it ? And if men in
their deep desire mistake the side the God
of battles is ranged on, the God of mercy
makes no mistake in numbering His own,
for all are His.

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 243

6. That all fighting is the fighting of
savages. (This is the plain meaning of the
distressed Englishman's words : " The spec-
tacle of the Christian peoples fighting each
other like savages.")

It is the cause that makes the martyr, the
patriot, and the hero. The robber risks his
life, and it is robbery. Belgium is fighting ;
and it is no robbery, but patriotism and
heroism.

All is not war-lust in the battlefield of
West Flanders. Assuredly there is war-
lust enough to drench the land in blood ;
but there is also heroism and honour enough
to redeem the blood-stained battlefields.
This war, which German patriots will hasten
to forget, is one which Belgian patriots will
teach their children's children to remember.

David slaying Goliath is a figure no less
noble than David slaying the lion ; to defend
his people was as stern a duty and as honour-
able a task as to defend his flock. The
point of honour in both struggles is not that

244 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the hero took the life of another, but that he
was prepared to lay down his own. This
redeemed the slaying of a noble beast and of
a fellow-man.

7. That progress is possible only to those
who have no religion.

We gather this from the despairing words :
" Perhaps humanity will begin to see the
futility of priest-ridden religion for progress
and civilization."

A man must be a close student in quiet
libraries, and not a spectator of his fellow-
men, if he looks upon European civilization
as priest-ridden. The statement that civili-
zation and religion are incompatibles is but
another proof that a denial is a dogma, that
scepticism and even agnosticism are theolo-
gies of denial or doubt, and that this war is
not a duel of men or weapons, but a conflict
of ideas. The wrestling is not of flesh and
blood, but of principles and powers. No
wonder many sober-minded Englishmen are
hurried into such inconsequent despair as

THROUGH WAR TOWARDS HOPE 245

stimulated the letter we have sought to ex-
plain and answer on this page. But despair
is not the fit way to meet the world's greatest
war. The gloom is so deep that in self-defence
we must rise to hope ; and that, in the long-
run, means the God of Hope, the one neces-
sary God of all consolation.

WAR WISDOM
OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

WAR WISDOM OF
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Some wise man of the present generation
has said : " No one can be entirely modern
who does not spend most of his leisure in
reading books at least five hundred years
old." For this reason let me give my
readers a literal translation of an article
of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is entitled :
" Whether a Religious Order can be
founded for Warfaring?"

(The great thinker always begins by giving
the arguments of his adversaries with limpid
clearness.)

First Objection. — It seems that no Re-
ligious Order could be organized for war-
faring. A Religious Order belongs to the
state of perfection. Now, to the state of
249

250 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

perfect Christian life pertains what our Lord
says : " But I say to you not to resist evil ;
but if one strike thee on the right cheek turn
to him also the other." Therefore no Re-
ligious Order can be founded for warfaring.

Second Objection. — Moreover, the bodily
strife of battle is a weightier thing than
the word -warfare that takes place in law
pleadings. But it is forbidden a religious
man to plead at the bar; as is clear from
the Decretal " De Postulando." Therefore,
much less may any Religious Order be
founded for warfaring.

Third Objection. — The state of religion is
a state of penance. But, according to law,
penitents are forbidden to be soldiers ; for it
is said in the Decretal " De Poenit " : " It
is clean contrary to ecclesiastical law that
anyone after penance should go back to
the secular army." Therefore no Religious
Order can be founded for warfaring.

Fourth Objection. — No Religious Order
can be organized for anything unjust. But,

WAR WISDOM 251

as Isidore says : " A just war is one that is
undertaken by imperial command." Now,
since religious are but private persons, it
seems they could not lawfully wage war ;
and hence a Religious Order could not be
organized for warfaring.

(St. Thomas now gives his own opinion.)
But, on the contrary, St. Augustine says
to Boniface : " Think not that no one who
bears weapons of war can please God. Of
these was the holy David, to whom the
Lord bore high witness." Now, Religious
Orders are organized that men may be well-
pleasing to God. Therefore nothing forbids
a Religious Order from being founded for
warfaring.

In reply, I say that a Religious Order can
be organized not only for the works of the
contemplative life, but also for the works of
the active life ; not, indeed, inasmuch as
these avail to obtain some worldly good,
but inasmuch as they concern help for our
neighbour and the worship of God. Now,

252 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the military profession can be directed to
the help of our neighbour not only as
regards private individuals but even as
regards the defence of the whole kingdom.
Hence of Judas Maccabeus is it said that
"he fought with cheerfulness the battle of
Israel, and he got his people great honour."

Again, it can be organized to preserve
the true service of God ; hence it is added
in the same place that Judas said : " We
will fight for our lives and our laws." And
later on Simon says : " You know what
great battles I and my brethren and the
house of my father have fought for the laws
and the sanctuary."

Hence a Religious Order may fittingly be
founded for warfaring — not, indeed, for any
temporal good, but for defence of divine
worship and of the public safety ; or of the
poor and downtrodden, according to the
Psalm lxxxi. : " Rescue the poor and de-
liver the needy out of the hand of the
sinner."

WAR WISDOM 253

Reply to the First Objection. — A man may
forbear to resist evil in two ways : First, by
forgiving an injury done to himself; and
this can belong to perfection when it may
prudently be done for the good of others.
Secondly, by patiently bearing injuries done
to others ; and this belongs to imperfection,
or even to sin, if a man can rightly resist
the wrongdoer. Hence Ambrose says :
" The fortitude that in war defends the
fatherland from the foe or in the home
defends the sick and friends from robbers,
is full of justice." Moreover, if a man has
the duty of safeguarding what belongs to
another and does not safeguard it, he sins ;
for it is praiseworthy in a man to bestow
what belongs to himself, not what belongs
to another. And much less what belongs to
God must not be neglected ; for Chrysostom
says that "to pass over injuries done to God
is great wickedness."

Reply to Second Objection. — To undertake
the function of advocate for any temporal

254 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

gain is repugnant to every Religious Order ;
but not so if it is undertaken by command
of the superior for the good of the monas-
tery ; or for the defence of the poor and
widows. Hence it is said in the Decretals :
" The Holy Synod decrees that henceforth
no cleric shall deal in business or mix him-
self in worldly affairs, except for the good
of orphans and widows." So likewise to
warfare for any temporal gain is contrary to
every Religious Order ; but not to warfare
for God's service.

Reply to Third Objection. — Worldly war-
faring is forbidden to penitents. But war-
faring for a divine purpose is given as a
penance ; as appears from those who are
given the penance to fight for the Holy
Land.

Reply to Fourth Objection. — No Religious
Order is so organized for warfaring that
they can wage war by their own authority ;
but only by the authority of the Sovereign
or Church.

WAR WISDOM 255

In this tense, precise, passionless state-
ment the second cousin of the Emperor
Frederic has succeeded in embodying nearly
every principle the mind of man needs to
deal wisely with the ultimate appeal of
war.

Thomas d'Aquino had lived almost all
his life within sight and sound of battle-
fields. He had probably been driven from
Monte Cassino by the hand of war. His
home had been sacked, his brothers killed
by the Emperor. Personally he was one of
those heroes who would have laid down
their lives for a great cause.

Yet he clearly distinguished a man's right
to give away what is his own from his right
or power to give away what is another's.
This simple distinction, were it known and
accepted to-day, would bring accurate think-
ing into the counsels of many men who are
saying "Peace, peace," when there is no
peace.

It is significant and characteristic that a

256 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

course of action which would normally be
hostile to the atmosphere of the cloister,
may lawfully be undertaken in defence of
the orphans, widows, the poor, the down-
trodden. The unfit alone are worthy of a
crusade ! Principles like these remind us
how far we have drifted from the thirteenth
century.

The optimism of the Saint is so absolute
that war, which many men look upon as
an incurable evil, may sometimes be so
righteous, just, and necessary that man can
dedicate to it that fine flower of Christian
mysticism — a Religious Order.

All this is most wise. But it is a wisdom
like unto her who is " fair as the moon and
terrible as an army in battle array."

A WAY OF PEACE

IT

"A

A WAY OF PEACE

Having one thing, I constantly occupy
myself by feigning to have the opposite.
Though the nearest sea is a hundred
miles from my writing-desk here on the
fringe of Cannock Chase, and though the
Trent is now only ankle deep as it swirls
slowly eastwards in the valley, I was at
the sea-coast this morning; to my deep
joy I forgot the scent of the hawthorn
for the smell of the tarred tackle of the
fishing craft. The glories of the broom and
laburnum were all blotted out by the grey
haze that made a mystic wall round the
east. The soft breeze from beech woods
was hardly an interruption of the winds
that came with music from the dancing
waves.

259

260 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

So much of war has been in my throat
and eyes these past months that in self-
pity I betook myself this morning into
ways of peace. T thereby sang again to
myself one of those songs of the heart
which no one seems to understand but one-
self. At any rate, when one begins to sing
them men slowly withdraw ; and the singer
is tempted to remember bitterly how, at the
writing of a Greater than himself, other men
withdrew.

At the present time our chief concern is
how a great war may be ended ; yet so
ended that a still greater war may not leap
up from the embers of our present sorrow.
Above all, we pray and strive that through
the help of victory over a powerful nation,
justice may be done to the least amongst the
nations of the West.

In sheer weariness of the horrors we are
all bearing in our efforts to see a war ended,
I took refuge in remembering how a great
war was once prevented ; and prevented in

A WAY OF PEACE 261

the midst of a race of warriors, the Spaniards
of the fifteenth century.

Martin the Younger, king of Aragon,
died in 1410. As his only son had died a
year before without leaving any legitimate
issue, six powerful claimants to the throne
threatened Aragon with the horrors of a
War of the Roses. These claimants were
John, Count of Prades ; Alphonsus, Duke
of Gandia ; Frederic, Count of Luna (natural
son of Martin's only son) ; James, Count of
Urgell ; Louis of Anjou, and Ferdinand,
Infant of Castille. Behind the candidature
of the Count of Urgell lay the influence and
the cross-bows of England. Louis of Anjou
depended on the support of France.

After more than a year of indecision the
three provinces of Catalonia, Aragon, and
Valencia had arrived at such a state of mis-
understanding that Europe might have been
convulsed by a fifteenth-century War of the
Spanish Succession.

The way out of this entanglement was

262 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

found by a man of genius, who happened to
be a saint ; to wit, Vincent Ferrer. In sheer
desperation the people of Aragon summoned
Vincent Ferrer from his missionary work in
Castille that he might give them the alms of
good counsel.

By the advice of the Grand Justiciar of
Aragon the whole affair of the succession
was entrusted to a small committee of nine
men, three from each of the three provinces
of the kingdom. In these dark days of war I
have felt a special joy in meditating on the
constitution of this committee of nine, who
gave a king to Aragon and peace to the
whole of Europe ! The principal member
of the committee, elected unanimously, was
Fray Vicente Ferrer, then in his sixty-third
year. He was elected as a representative of
his native Province of Valencia. He was a
simple friar.

Another representative of Valencia was
St. Vincent's brother, Boniface Ferrer. He
was then Prior of the Grande Chartreuse.

A WAY OF PEACE 263

The third representative of Valencia was a
renowned jurist, Gines Rabaxa, who during
the course of the deliberations felt his re-
sponsibility so much that he obtained his
dismissal by feigning madness !

Aragon sent the Bishop of Huesca, the
Grand Justiciar, and Francis d'Aranda, a
Carthusian monk. Catalonia sent the
Archbishop of Tarragona and two skilled
lawyers.

The regulations settling the nature of this
committee are a joy to read :

" 1. The affair of the succession shall be
entrusted to nine persons of upright con-
science, of good name, and of such strength
of character that they can carry through to
the end the matter undertaken — that is, to
name the one to whom in justice we should
take the oath of fealty.

"2. These nine persons shall be graduates
in Canon or Civil Law.

"3. Whomsoever these nine persons, or
if six of them, including one from each of

264 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

the three kingdoms, elect, the same shall
be recognized as true, definite, and lawful
king.

"5. These nine persons, after Confession
and Holy Communion before all the people,
will solemnly swear to carry the affair
through with the greatest possible speed ;
to name the king according to God, justice,
and conscience, all human affection set
aside ; and to reveal to no one before the
day of promulgation their intention, their
vote, or the vote of their fellows."

The constitution of this Committee of
Peace may well be studied in the days of
war. Nine men, none of them nobles or
professional politicians, have the fate of
Spain and of Europe in their trust. Of the
nine men all are experts in human or Divine
laws, and are called upon, in conscience, to
decide the matter by principles of justice.
They are not commissioned to make a
decision according to that impossible factor
or principle, the " Balance of Power." The

A WAY OF PEACE 265

men who appointed and commissioned them
felt that justice is the highest politics, and
that in every political entanglement the
shortest way out is by doing what is right.
This principle has lessons for that country
which wronged justice by invading Belgium ;
and found it not the shortest, but the longest,
way to Paris and to London.

Again, of the nine committeemen five are
clerics ; of the five clerics three are cloistered
religious ; of the three religious one is a
canonized saint. By his profession the priest
is an ethical teacher. His sphere is not
politics, where judgment is made according
to what seems to be, or not to be, politically
advantageous. He concerns himself essen-
tially with justice. He seeks to find out
the rights and duties of each section of his
flock. He has no power to absolve those
who absolve themselves from their own
duties. He must withhold God's mercies
from those who withhold justice from their
neighbours. And in supporting this code of

266 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

justice he must sometimes be prepared to
resist unto blood.

To talk of these things to-day, with
Europe of the politicians in a sea of blood,
is like singing hymns at a conflagration ! I
do not think that as a rule fires are quenched
by a hymn. Yet the faith-loving souls that
sing hymns have prevented conflagrations.
At any rate, nine men gathered together in
the name of God and of justice gave Aragon
its King Ferdinand. Europe was hardly a
century older when the offspring of Fer-
dinand united Aragon and Castile into
Spain of the sixteenth century. Men who
see only the greatness of Spain in politics
and war do not always realize that one of its
greatest achievements was in the ways of
peace.

When the king was crowned and the
committee saw its work of justice at an end
the nine men went back with no other
reward than the gratitude of their country-
men and the praise of history. The two

A WAY OF PEACE 267

monks withdrew quietly into the silence of
Chartreuse. The other religious, the apostle,
the saint, after a brief delay, in which he
helped to give to Christendom its Sovereign
Pontiff, withdrew from the lands where his
deeds had made him famous. His apostolic
heart could not seek quiet ; it could seek
only hiddenness, after the example of Him
Who hides and works behind the veil of
the Sanctuary. The hiddenness St. Vincent
sought as his only reward he found amongst
the Breton fisher-folk of the wild rocks of
France that jut out into the great Western
Ocean. There, with his eyes, the eyes of an
apostle, straining towards the hidden lands
of the West, he died and was buried.

It was the fifteenth century ; and now it
is the twentieth century. Yet he and I are
not five centuries, but a world apart.

THE HOLY FATHER AND THE
INVASION OF BELGIUM

THE HOLY FATHER AND THE
INVASION OF BELGIUM

The sudden prominence given to the Holy
See has been one of the surprising features
of this war of surprises. The war had not
been many days old when from all sides the
Fisherman was challenged to take a judges
part in the European quarrel. Seeing that
his flock were to be found not on one side
only but on both sides of the war, the Holy
Father of Christendom was called, as no
one else was called, to a role of perfect
neutrality.

From the first moment of his election
to the Chair of the Fisherman, Pope
Benedict XV. has made it clear that the
duty of being neutral would be his chief
care. He has repeated the phrase in public
271

272 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

and private utterances with an insistence
which reminds us of the oft-repeated words
of the beloved disciple : " My little children,
love one another."

The phrase " to be neutral " was good and
even sufficient. But some men, feeling that
it was good, justified it in ways that were
bad ; and others — they were always a few —
attacked it for its insufficiency. Thus there
were some who simply warned the Pope off
any attempt at interference, by reminding
him that as a priest his proper place was not
the council-chamber or the senate house,
but the sanctuary and the sacristy. They
told him bluntly that it was his function to
lay down abstract laws and not to meddle
with dogmatic or ethical facts such as the
breach of Belgian neutrality or the question
of atrocities.

On the other hand there was a little
group of men who, remembering that in
the wars against Napoleon Great Britain
had found no stauncher ally than the Holy

THE INVASION OF BELGIUM 273

See, boldly demanded that it should be now
as it was a century ago. But they did not
remember two simple facts : (1) that the
Holy See was a Temporal Power and could
give temporal aid a century ago ; and (2)
that this temporal power had long since
been wrested from the Popes, largely
through the connivance of Great Britain
and the other Allies who were now so
anxious for the Pope's patronage.

A good deal of misunderstanding was
caused by not rightly grasping the full
meaning of the phrase "to be neutral, or to
maintain neutrality."

We in these islands know better than
most others the laws of umpire or referee
in our national games. The chief function
of the umpire or referee is to be strictly
neutral.

But this neutrality is not a tongue-tied,
passive thing. In the very exercise of his
neutrality it is the duty of the umpire to
see that fair-play is the rule of the game.

18

274 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

If one side or the other breaks a law of the
game the umpire instantly calls them to
account and imposes a penalty. It is no
matter whether the law has been broken
by design or accident. Once fair-play has
been broken, the game must be brought
to a standstill until the penalty has been
paid.

The official neutrality of the Holy See
was not, therefore, a passive toleration of
every enormity inflicted in the name of war.
Assuredly war, as the Pope knows, is some-
times a lawful end. But it is no doctrine of
the Catholic Church that the end justifies
the means ; or, in other words, that as some
ends are so bad as to corrupt any means,
however good, so some other ends are so
good as to justify any means, however bad.
And if any end could justify wrong means
it could not be such a relative end as war,
which is in itself a physical evil so great
that it can be tolerated only as a last means
towards some higher good.

THE INVASION OF BELGIUM 275

It was clear, then, that though the Holy-
Father's duty was one of neutrality towards
the combatants, it was not one of neutrality
towards the Ten Commandments. The
Holy Father could not see theft and forget
"Thou shalt not steal"; nor could he see
murder and forget " Thou shalt not kill."
Indeed, he would remember the word of the
Lord to the prophet Ezechiel : " Son of
man, I have made thee a watchman to the
house of Israel. If when I say to the wicked,
' Thou shalt surely die,' thou declare it not
to him ... I will require his blood at thy
hands."

The duty of neutrality was nowise a duty
of silence ; and the silence of Pope Bene-
dict XV. is now at an end.

During the past few weeks the Successor
of St. Peter has spoken out with a clearness
that reveals the moral truth, yet leaves his
neutrality intact. He has not yielded to
either of the two false views about his
neutrality, but has acted firmly, if quietly,

276 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

as the chief visible Warden of the moral
order in the world. He has not yielded on
the one hand to those who told him to keep
silence in his sanctuary. On the other
hand, he has not taken sides in the mere
international struggle. He has made no
declaration about the Great War. But he
has spoken a word which may be more
effective than the hoarse eloquence of the
guns. He has spoken quite definitely about
the invasion of Belgium, and has called it an
" injustice " and " a breach of international
law."

These are the words addressed to the
Belgian Minister to the Vatican by Cardinal
Gasparri, Secretary of State. The Pope
makes them his own by referring to them
and enclosing them in a letter to the Cardinal-
Archbishop of Paris :

" As regards the neutrality of Belgium I
must assure your Excellency in the most
categorical manner that the Holy Father
did not give M. Latapie the reply which

THE INVASION OF BELGIUM 277

he has dared to imagine and state in his
article..

" The truth of the matter is as follows :
The German Chancellor, Herr von Beth-
mann-Hollweg, openly declared on August 4,
1914, in Parliament that in invading Belgian
territory Germany was violating the neutra-
lity of Belgium contrary to international
law. . . . On the Chancellor's own admis-
sion Germany invaded Belgium with the
consciousness of thereby violating her neu-
trality, and so of committing an injustice.
. . . Hence the invasion of Belgium was
directly included in the words of the Allocu-
tion in the Consistory of January 22nd."

These plain words, worthy of the Key-
bearer and the Rock, are no breach of Papal
neutrality. They are not the neglect, but
the fulfilment, of an onerous international
duty.

One point of wisdom in them must not
be overlooked. It will probably be urged
by some that the Italian Pope found speech

278 EUROPE'S EWE-LAMB

only after his native country Italy had
definitely ranged itself on the side of the
Allies. But his Holiness takes care to point
out that this "injustice," this breach of
"international law" — namely, the violation
of Belgian neutrality — "was directly included
in the Allocution of January 22nd," many
weeks before his native country took sides
with the Allies.

The words of the Holy Father spoken
through his Cardinal Secretary of State are
but one more proof that if Rome moves
slowly it is because her judgments are truth,
being the weighed judgments of one who
worships the God of Truth.

Printed in England

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McNabb

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AUTHOR

Europe's ewe-lamb .,

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524
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McNabb B

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Europe's ewe lamb ... .M25